A month of bass followed by a month of guitar

No, it’s not one of Joseph’s lesser-known dreams, it’s my recent practice schedule. Last month I played bass at a couple of Casa del Funk gigs, and this month I’ll be back on guitar for an Acuphuncture gig. Switching back to bass was fun, though the rehearsals quickly reminded me how much more physical the instrument is: my left hand and wrist were aching from the extra stretching and strength required for fretting, and my right-hand fingertips were getting chewed on the strings. I quickly drafted in my usual practice tune, Dark Lady by DJ Food, which is used as the backing music in this video:

(Which is as strangely fascinating as time-lapse videos normally are.)
The line goes something like this:
   1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ---------------------------------
D -57--------------------------57--
A ---00000020305067~7------------00
E -------------------0000003500----
It’s a great semiquaver work-out for the right hand with string skipping and makes you do a bit of damping practise with your left.

I’ll have a P please, Bob

A Fender P, that is. I couldn’t find anyone that wanted to buy my old Yamaha BBG-5S, but I did find someone that wanted to swap this little beauty for it. It’s a Mexican-made “50’s Classic” Precision. I don’t think it was made for long, or perhaps it didn’t sell well, because there are very few reviews on Harmony Central for it. Either that, or it’s mainly purchased by people that hate filling in online review pages.

Anyway, I have a vague intention to sell it on, for the main reason that I’m going to give up my only bass playing gig in Casa in favour of playing guitar for them again. (For those that care, I did so because I wondered if it’s better to do one thing well or two things in a half-arsed kind of way, so thought I might cut back on bass and try and focus on guitar for a while.) In the meantime however, I have the urge to fit it with a nice set of flats and go all Jamerson.

Two thumbs fresh

Following my usual pattern of trying to run before I can walk, I was looking at this youtube video:

It’s a nice example of double thumbing, which is something I’d previously only really thought of (i.e. dismissed) in terms of Wooten-esque pyrotechnics, however there it’s used for a perfectly respectable groove. Giving the technique a bit of work, it looks like I’ll have to do a bit of readjustment from my usual slap thumb, which bounces off the strings rather than following through. Also a lot of the time it doesn’t really sound like slap, more like I’m using the edge of my thumb like a guitar plectrum. There’s also a nagging thought in my mind that the groove in the video could have quite easily been played fingerstyle and probably would have sounded just as good. The technique has piqued my interest though, so I think I’ll keep working on it.

Warwick

No, not Warwick Davis, everyone’s favourite from Willow, but a new addition to my family of basses: a Warwick Fortress One.  I’d try and justify it, but frankly I fancied a new bass.  While my day at the Bass Gallery hadn’t found any bass that was definitely easier to play, none really stood out as more difficult; in addition, Tiago (Acuphuncture bassist) happens to have one of these bad boys and I like his tone, so when I saw one come up for sale on basschat I thought I’d pick it up.  As it turns out, it’s the revenge of “tone is in the fingers,” and I still sound shit   The main thing that the new bass has shown me is that you really, really have to change your strings more often than you think: the ones on my Yamaha are totally dead.  My plan is to try both basses for a while, decide which one I prefer then sell the other, so I’ll definitely have to restring the yammy just to make a fair comparison.

The birth of basschat.co.uk

Remember I mentioned the rise of basstalk?  Turns out the rise was followed particularly rapidly by a fall, partly from the acrimony of the original move from bassworld.co.uk, and partly due to a name conflict with talkbass.com.  However, from the ashes of this online low-note BBQ rises basschat, the premier community for UK bassists.  Register, contribute, and get to know the person in your band who plays a guitar that’s lacking a few strings that little bit better.

A slimmer bass neck?

I’ve got a Yamaha BBG-5S at the minute which I love the sound of but don’t like the fact that the neck is wide enough to drive a bus down.  I try and keep to the idealised hand position of thumb on back of neck, wrist flat, but that results in a bit of a bit of a stretch to reach the E and B strings. However, after an hour or so in gigs I’ll start to get tired/lazy and drop my wrist to make the stretch easier, which compresses the tendons and leads to wrist strain. Now this is obviously at least in part a technique issue, but I felt that it might be slightly alleviated if the neck of the bass wasn’t quite so wide… so I went shopping .  I headed down to London, specifically to the Bass Gallery in Camden.  After initially being put off by the shutters over the windows and closed door, but I rang the bell and gained access to a veritable Aladdin’s cave of basses. The guys there were very helpful, and I worked my way through a few different Laklands (the Joe Osbourne signature sounding particularly good), Ibanez (a Soundgear which felt and sounded a bit cheap, though does have the narrowest neck in the world; and a K5 which sounded very good), a Sadowski (neck wider than my current Yamaha!), a Status, a Warwick (which Kyla liked the best), a Fender MIM Jazz…

After all of which I decided that despite being one of the low end Yamahas, my BBG-5S is actually pretty damn good, and doesn’t have a ridiculously fat neck after all. In fact I checked the measurements of the neck against the Lakland website, and barring a certain confusion over crappy imperial/decimal mix (what the heck does 1.8″ mean? 1 + 8 tenths of an inch? Surely that should be in 16ths or 32nds) I think my yammy’s neck has nearly identical dimensions to a Lakland 55-01, though the B string on the latter was a lot clearer and “articulate.”

All of which means that I might not be rushing out to buy a new bass soon… unless GAS out-weighs sense

Bass Talk site goes live

Bass Talk [edit: now at Bass Chat] is the replacement for the old bassworld.co.uk site. It sounds like the person who ran the old site had an acrimonious split with the rest of the team, so the other guys migrated the database over to a new domain. The name is bound to piss off the people over Talk Bass, but hey, you can’t please everyone.

Turn it up

I was out playing with Casa yesterday at our guitarist’s wedding.  I’d noticed that I could play things when practicing by myself that I couldn’t when in the band, and I started to wonder whether it was because I was playing harder, and so tensing up.  I thought I’d take a bit of advice I’d read somewhere and turn the amp up above where it normally needs to be and just play softer, and lo and behold I nailed all sorts of things that I previously hadn’t managed in gigs.  Obviously it’s all about staying relaxed!  Still can’t play the “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” bassline properly, but hey, I can’t expect miracles.

Alternate picking and plucking

Before we get into this post, I’d like to say that most discussions about the technical side of guitar playing are liable to set off the Finbarr Saunders within you. If you find yourself unable to read the phrase “right hand technique” without sniggering, I suggest you skip this article.

I read this post about alternate picking with interest; I use economy picking a lot, particularly if the passage is too fast for me to play “properly” (whatever that means). I noticed that I also do a similar thing when playing bass, for example using the standard guitarist’s warm-up exercise:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G -8765-------------
D -----8765---------
A ---------8765-----
E -------------8765-
...imimmimiimimmimi
Rather than strictly alternating index and middle fingers, I’m raking the notes when changing string. The advantage of this is speed, but I have found that this is at the expense of accuracy, because I’ll usually slightly rush the second note if it’s played by the same finger. I decided to experiment and forced myself to play with strict alternation, even to the extent that if a groove started on an “ee” or “ah” I’d begin with my middle finger, effectively never breaking the alternating pattern. For example, in “Reuben’s In”, an instrumental tune taken from the Ocean’s 11 soundtrack that Casa play:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G ------------------
D ------------------
A -----5--7-5-5-5---
E -0--7------7----70
...i..mi..m.mim.m.mi
I find that I’m a lot more accurate on the semi-quavers using this pattern than if I begin each group of notes with my index finger. (Don’t even ask why I’ve chosen to finger it this way; I found it a stretch to play in first position, so accepted the string skip in the third beat in favour of rent tendons.) I guess it’s all about generating some sort of internal metronome, and if I imagine my fingers are constantly playing semi-quavers even if they aren’t, it helps to keep my timing more even. The first really tricky thing I’ve found while using this technique is skipping strings, e.g. a pattern from the bassline of “There’s Only So Much Oil In The Ground”:
...1.&.2.&.3.&.4.&.1
G ---55--55--55--55-
D ------------------
A -3~--3~--3~--3~---
E ------------------
...i.imi.imi.imi.im.
For some reason my fingers just don’t like playing this, though I think it might simply be a matter of practice. However, after this experimenting with my technique, I checked out this video of Simon Merrick playing Space Cowboy. I think I can see rakes and on-beat notes played with his middle finger, so the kind of rigid pattern I’ve been using isn’t the be-all and end-all (not that I thought it would be).

I’m considering doing a similar exercise on guitar, forcing myself into relearning a few pieces adhering to strict alternate picking; potentially it’ll clean up my often sloppy timing. At the very least it’ll make me think about what I’m playing again, which is always a good thing!

Rocco Prestia and Tower of Power

Casa have set me a little bit of test!  I get back from holiday, and first rehearsal back I get the Tower of Power tune There’s Only So Much Oil In The Ground transcription dropped infront of me.  Now, I was aware of ToP, but hadn’t actually heard them in action before, so it was a little bit jaw-dropping to hear the incredibly solid semi-quaver groove the bassist was using.  A little bit of interweb research and I find that it’s being played by one Rocco Prestia.  You can see a vid of ToP playing here, and here is an excerpt from a video of Rocco’s (mullets ahoy!).  I can see this is going to be a punishing technique to master…