Wednesday Technique… on Saturday

The second part about sweeping that is the more difficult aspect is the coordination between your right and left hand. To paraphrase from a sweep video with instructor Herman Li of Dragonforce, this is what you need to know about sweeping:

Sweeping is like playing an arppegio (that’s why I use chordal arpeggio shapes in sweeps) but instead of playing all the notes and letting them ring out (listen to the 3 Doors Down single “Kryptonite”) you need to abbreviate and choke the note so that it plays really REALLY short. You also need to keep your movement in one specific direction.

So lets look at the two hands:

Your left hand needs to keep the notes short. Either choke them with your left and right hand combined or some variation of just one hand or the other. When the note is struck, I tend to lift the finger immediately off the string while not using my non fretting fingers to choke that string out!

Your right hand needs to execute the sweep in one direction. If you’re using your fingers, use one finger or the other to achieve the sweep. Going down (from higher string to lower string) I use my index finger, and going up I use my thumb.

There are millions of different sweep videos and lessons for bass out there on the giant interwebs, but this is the closest things I’ve seen to executing guitar sweeps on the bass. Try it for four strings, 5 strings, whatever type of bass you have. But again, start SLOW!

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    Wednesday Technique.

Ghost notes are a simple, percussive element to add to your playing that millions of players have been utilizing for decades.

The difference between a ghost note and a muted note is not that hard to understand. The Ghost note is muted by the left hand. When you’re fretting a note, you hold down the string firm enough that you don’t create a harmonic, but light enough that you don’t sound the damn note. If you look in music notation/tablature, it’s that “x” that appears from time to time.

A muted note (at least on the bass guitar) is a note that you rest your plucking hand in such a way that you muffle the string so that it doesn’t ring out as loud or as long. The video (while on the upright) should help clarify.

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Thursday Theory

Inversions. They are a simple yet very effective tool in constructing fancier basslines. The video lessons goes more in depth on how to construct chords and invert these chords on the bass. Here’s more in depth lesson as to the practicality of constructing a bassline using inversions for a more commonly seen bassline.

In the three note chord world (which we have gone over is a chord based off of the first, third and fifth note of a given scale) there are three different ways to play a chord:

Root Position: When playing a bassline based on a root position chord, if you were playing a C major chord, your bassline starts on C.

1^st inversion: It’s a chord constructed on the third of the chord. So looking at a C major chord, you would start your bassline on the E.

2^nd inversion: You start your chord on the fifth of the chord. So C major chord has a bassline starting on G.

So lets look at a chord progression: C Major, A minor, D minor, and G Dominant (based off of our three note chord construction, the chords are constructed as CEG, AcE, DfA, and GBD [Dominant chords include a seventh which we’ll discuss next week]).

A simple 8^th note pulsing bassline following root position would dictate you play C, A, D, and G from chord to chord. A bassline built on 1^st inversion you would play a bassline that is build on the third of all the chords which would be E, c, f, and B. 2^nd inversion would be a bassline on G, E, A, and D. But we can use inversions to create a bassline that builds tension.

The C major and A minor chords share 2 notes: C and E. So in an 8^th note pulsing bassline, you can play a bassline from both chords that is just the note C, or the note E. In theory, this means you either went from a root position C major chord to a 1^st inversion A minor chord OR a 1^st inversion C major chord to a 2^nd inversion A minor chord.

The A minor to D minor chord only share one note, the A. the D minor and G dominant chord share the D. So knowing all of this, here’s a couple of simple 8^th note pulsing basslines with explanations on how they are inverted from chord to chord:

C, A, D, G (root position only)

C, C (1^st inversion A minor), A (2^nd inversion D minor), G

C, C, A, D (2^nd inversion G Dominant)

E (1^st inversion C Major), E (2^nd inversion A minor), F (2^nd inversion D minor), G

E, E, A, B (2^nd inversion G Dominant)

G (2^nd inversion C major), A, A, B (1^st inversion G Dominant)

 Again, these are simple 8^th note pulsing basslines (which you here all the time). But you look ad how there is melodic potential in playing a bassline that sounds more scalar than root position-y. Start experimenting and have fun! That’s the whole point to playing the instrument.

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    Wednesday Technique.

Plectrum Approaches

I’ve talked about the pick before a couple times. But like playing fingerstyle, there are many different approaches to playing pick style. I’m gonna go through a bunch of different ways in this posting:

Finger Picks: These are picks that are more commonly seen with banjo and certain fingerstyle guitar players. But there is merit to it on the bass and is seen in some rare (but profound) instances. Look at Tony Levin. It’s not a traditional case of the fingerpick, but his funk fingers are plectrums that are used to make a slap funk sound. John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin has in several photos been seen with a finger pick wrapped around his strings up near the tuning pegs. The finger pick is a pick that has a plastic extension part added to it where you wear it on your thumb. There are finger picks for the rest of your fingers, but the most common fingerpick is the thumb. This allows you to jump seamlessly from fingerstyle to pick playing with no fanageling of the pick in your hand whatsoever at all.

Coins/Metal slabs: Don’t think you’re using a sheet of aluminum when I say “metal slab”. But it’s a small piece of metal that gives pick playing an extra heavy edge. I don’t use coins or metal because it will wreck the strings even faster than the natural decay of the string from general use.

Felt covered picks: Picks are used for a more sharp and precise attack. It does take away some of the low end and warmth of playing with your fingers, but with right adjustments on the E.Q. of your bass, you can reduce a lot of this. Covering a pick with felt is a way to get that fingerstyle sound whilst playing with a pick. Granted, there are ways you can emulate pick style playing with your fingers, but we’ve been over that =)

The regular run of the mill pick: Traditionally we see the pick as this triangular shaped piece of plastic. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Daron Malakian of System of a Down is seen using GIGANTIC triangle picks, and Matt Heafy of Trivium plays with those Dunlop jazz picks (even though the size of his hand dwarfs the pick no matter how he holds it). But like many artists who experiment with how they play a certain style, there are certain ways to play with a pick that can result in different tugs and pulls against your hand as you play.

You (traditionally) play with the pick nestled between your thumb and index finger of your plucking hand. You can use whatever finger is more comfortable though, my friend Pat Young of the Syracuse based band Perpetual Burn and former bandmate of three college bands (Sword of Truth, Atra Sententia and Mr. 6) plays with the pick between his thumb and middle finger. And traditionally you play holding the fatest part of the pick between your fingers, and the narrow point plucking the strings. Depending on where you grab the pick allows greater ease to doing things like pinch (artificial) harmonics (which we’ll go over next week) and other tricks like pick tapping and such.

This technique can cause some problems though for certain players. The pick wiggles and flops around in your grip as you play. “Why don’t you just grip the pick firmer?” you may ask? Cause you’re going to cramp up and hurt yourself! You need to hold it loose enough that you don’t cramp up in your plucking hand, but tight enough that you don’t keep dropping the damn thing. Some do this by trying out different picks till the find the one type that sits the best in their hand.

There are ways that are more experimental and keeps more of those coins in your pocket. If the tradition pick slips and wiggles around in your hand, try holding the pick differently. The bassist to Hatebreed, Chris Beattie, I’ve seen playing holding the narrow tip between his fingers, and using the fat part of the pick to strike the string. From the band Cosmic Sea out of Oswego, Larry Chippone, another friend of mine, has been playing pickstyle (for years) holding the pick on the side. I’ve experimented with this style and I have to admit, I’m a soon to be convert. It reduces floppiness, and increase the potential chance for pinch harmonics with a pick style approach.

It’s a bit longer than I anticipated any of you were expecting, but the more you know… well… G.I. JOE!

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Wednesday Technique.

Developing speed.

We all want to play faster. The only tried and true way of accomplishing this is to be able to play faster passages slowly (near painfully slow) and work your way up in the tempo department.

Here’s a great way to go about playing faster tempo’s and accomplish playing these tempo’s at a faster rate. Play at double time! It’s easy to accomplish this. If you’re looking to accomplish playing 8^th notes at a tempo at like 200 BPM, tick the tempo down to like 80 BPM and play 16^th notes. You build up the same strength and endurance that you would if you were slowly climbing up the tempo ladder by playing it as it’s written.

8^th notes have the same value as two 16^th notes, just like quarter notes have the same value as 2 8^th notes. Now, if it’s a musical passage is a series in 4/4 time, playing it at double time you need to count it in 2/4. Counting out 16^th notes in 2/4 (1 E & A, 2 E & A) is the same as counting out 8^th notes in 4/4 (1 &, 2 &, 3 &, 4 &). Always be mindful of the meter, and this double time technique will serve you well.

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Practice What You Preach Friday

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This week it’s “Anarchy In The U.K.”. I utilize this weeks technique. Enjoy it cuz it’s a fun song!

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Wednesday Technique

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One Finger Technique

What is this technique you say?!?! It’s quite simple, if you play fingerstyle, you use one goddamn finger!

It’s it difficult? On an endurance level it is. Using the same damn finger over and over again can be difficult if you don’t have the endurance built up. But there are sounds you can emulate using just one finger. Using one finger with Geddy Lee technique (which you can find in my earlier youtube lesson posts), you can emulate a pick sound with the same precision and execution as a pick playing hoodlum. But the muting potential for a fingerstyle player utilizing one finger, are boudless!

The fact of the matter is, muting with your left hand is possible using the traditional multi-finger (2 or more) approach. But using one finger, you have to angle your right hand so that your finger of choice (I go with my index finger simply due to the fact that it’s the strongest finger on my right hand) so that it’s the only finger that can strike the string. You can traditionally palm mute with your right hand, and even encorporate more precise sweep patterns by using just one finger.

Use a metronome. Use your common sense. Don’t go bonkers with this technique until you can execute it completely accurately on a given song.

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Thursday Theory

Scalar basslines are basslines that are reflective of the chord that is used in the song. There are minor chords/minor sounding chords and minor scales that work with said chords, and major chords/major sounding chords and major scales that work with said chords. But it’s important to know how they all relate to each other in order to be able to utilize this technique effectively.

“The Man Who Sold The World” from David Bowie utilizes chords and scales that interchange between Dm and FMaj (this is an example of relative minor, minor and major tonalities that have the same key signature). So lets look at it from an analytical perspective.

There are four chords. Dm, A Maj, F Maj and C Dominant. The Dm, and A Maj are the two chords that reflect the key of Dm (they are the tonic [root] and dominant [fifth] of the scale. How did I determine this? Remember last week when I showed you how to find the root, third and fifth of a chord based off the numeric values of the scale? It applies to finding the chords that are used in a given key. The note that you build the scale off of is what the key is based off of (so a Dm scale, D is what the key is based off of). I show you how to play a natural minor scale in the video. So I’m going to go off from here.

The Dm chords used, if you played a scalar bassline, you’d play that natural minor scale. When you go to that A Maj chord, here’s where it gets complicated. In a chord progression in a minor key, you CANNOT have (in traditional theory) a minor V chord (a chord that spells root, minor third, and fifth) resolving to a minor i chord (and the v and i are the roman numerals for 5 and 1). You need a dominant V going to a minor i. A dominant chord, based off of the chord construction lesson we had last week, is a major triad chord, with an added note that we’ll get into sometime soon. The reason why the C natural raises to a C# is due to the whole resolution factor. That C# going to D sounds better than C natural to D. So if you played the scalar bassline, you would play an A Dominant scale (which I also show in the video).

Then you have FMaj and C dominant. Where you simply play the respective scales. All of this should make more sense in the video tomorrow, write me if you are confused.

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Wednesday Technique.

Floating thumb is a technique that involves the thumb of your right hand, or just flat out your plucking hand. Instead of keeping your thumb anchored to the pickup or thumbrest of your bass, you move it around.

There are a couple of different ways to approach the floating thumb. One of the ways is to move your hand along the low E string as you are playing. It helps you create different tones, the string tension varies allowing you to improve your speed or slow you down, and there’s less of a chance that you’re going to force your hand to potentially cramp by just jamming your thumb into the bass.

The other way to use floating thumb is by moving it from string to string. Reason for this is to with more ease strike the high strings on your bass (really comes in handy for anything over a 4 string bass). You would rest your hand against the string itself.

Using the floating thumb creates opportunities in muting, creating artificial (pinch) harmonics, and speed. Think about it, you are not anchoring your thumb, it’s just floating in space. Now play (with your thumb floating) “Immigrant Song”, the chorus. You’ll find that you can jump from string to string MUCH faster.

Keep an eye on how your hand and wrist responds. Keep it as straight as possible. There are certain heights that are recommended to play certain techniques properly. As far as I’m concerned, as long as you can play up and down the neck, reach all the notes across the ENTIRE neck, who cares? Hang it as low or as high as you want. I had it up pretty high for the longest time, but in order to keep my wrist straight to prevent carpel tunnel, my playing arm from like the elbow to my shoulder would cramp up. I wear it lower now, and can still do all the things I did wearing it higher. The important thing is just keeping that wrist/arm straight so that it reduces any physical damage. 

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            Thursday Theory

Arpeggios are probably one of your best friends as a bassist. Arpeggios are when you play the notes in a chord one by one rather than the entire chord.

Well, how do you know how to construct the chord? This is an issue that does bother some newbies to music theory. I’m going to try and break it down as best I can and as easy as I can.

Arpeggios are created with the use of a root note (the note that the chord is based off of), the third of the chord, and the fifth of the chord. There are extended chords that include the 7^th, 9^th, and what have you, but we will start with the basic three note chord.

But wait, how do you know how to find the third and fifth of the chord? Well, there are a couple of different ways, and I’m going to make it as simple as possible.

Say you’re looking to build a D major chord. One way you can do that is use the major scale. The major scale is constructed (starting with the root note [first note in construction] going to the second note of the scale) in a series of whole steps and half steps are W(hole)-W-H(alf)-W-W-W-H. Whole and half steps are how far the notes are away from each other. The half step is one note up chromatically from the next note (so C-C# is considered a half step away). Whole steps are two half steps away (so taking the same notes, you would go C-D as D is one half step up from C#).

Taking this into consideration, here’s how you would create the D major scale. D (Whole), E (Whole) F# (Half) G (Whole) A (Whole) B (Whole) C# (Half) D. That’s the scale octave to octave. This is true for EVERY major scale. You can use the W, W, H, W, W, W, H to create major scales for EVERY note on the fret board.

Back to constructing a three note D major chord. Count out the notes in the scale (D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D). We have a 7 note scale (there are 7 different notes in the scale before you start the scale over again going up another octave or down the octave). The root note (D) is the 1^st note of the scale. If you continue to count up, F# is the third note in the scale, and A is the Fifth note in the scale. Well there you go! You have the three notes you need to construct the major scale. I hope this made sense.

If you have been following me for a while, this has been a rehashment of previous theory lessons. It’s important to understand this and I’ll be utilizing this approach to discuss the construction of other chords.