Apr 08 2009
Upright is Hard!
So last night I got about an hour of amplified practice in with my new electric upright bass. I’m not sure why I thought I’d have such a seamless transition. I had played a higher end version of the instrument that I got at a jam session last fall. It was a shorter scale one, so it was really easy to play. Mine is a full scale neck, so especially up top the notes are really far apart. It’s a physical impossibility to play the same way as I would my bass guitar. There’s more sliding involved, which sounds amazing on an upright. My upright is one of the ones with dot on the neck to show you where the notes are. A lot of bassists consider this cheating, but I consider it a necessity, at least at this point. So we played a few songs and I really had to strip it down to the most simplistic lines as possible. There’s one song that involves quite a bit of left hand fingering and that was the one where my intonation really needs work. Otherwise I wasn’t too bad. I’m definitely going to need to put a lot of practice time into this thing, and hopefully take a lesson or two. For now, here’s a beginners’ lesson from YouTube:
