I’m sitting in my office practicing and a co-worker stopped by and listened…“you use too much thumb, you’re still playing the bass like a guitar”. Do you play bass or guitar? Thanks for stopping by. But he’s right, having that picking technique is cool to have in the back pocket but I have got to seriously develop a gallop technique.
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I too am struggling with the gallop amongst other things. I’m just playing it slow at the moment and hoping I’ll get to do a Steve Harris one day
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that my friend is not even on the radar yet. but if I can get my homework done this weekend I am hoping to post a cover tune and we can all cringe a bit at my gallop, piedmont picking hybrid.
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I’ve been practicing a slow gallop on Dio’s Holy Diver. Nowhere near Maiden speed but it’s a start.
I’ve also been dabbling with Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter but that’s a slow work in progress lol
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I’ve been picking a few bass players I want to emulate, Dusty Hill, Tommy Shannon, James Dewar, and then there’s Bootsy.
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I’ve been playing a bit of ZZ Top which involves a fair bit of chugging .
Not listened to a lot of Tommy Shannon’s stuff but I’ll have a listen and see where that goes. I like bluesy stuff although I haven’t listened to a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughan?
James Dewar is an excellent bassist but not really my sort of thing as is Bootsy although I must confess to looking at a few funk bass lines recently after getting the P bass.
I’ve been attempting to emulate Neil Murray’s stuff from early Whitesnake which I’m finding quite technically challenging.
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I’ll give it a listen…at this point I find it all challenging. Any time I sit to play someone elses line I’m all thumbs (not in a good way). I can sit there for hours and riff and flow on my own and be really content but like Todd Rundgren said, “what is the point of creating art that only 17 people in the world can appreciate” so I really need to learn songs and it helps to see how experts in the field play over changes, rhythms, stylistic differences, note selection…how the hell they do gallop picking…LOL
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My ultimate pedaling/chugging exercise is Hysteria.
Josh does a great cover here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FECUG7k5gY
nonstop 93BPM 16th notes for almost the whole song. Left hand is not too hard; right hand is for me for more than a few measures.
I can do it at about 75% speed. Getting faster than that for me is tough to do with consistency. Been working on it for a long time.
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that was incredible
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I’ve had a go at that @howard and if you’re managing 75% speed you’re doing really well!
I seem to have a real mental block with the order of the notes even though in theory it shouldn’t be that bad. Mind you I have a mental block with a few other simpler tunes too
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Teaching vid here:
It’s a fun riff, not too hard… until you speed it up 
For extended play I top out at around the 70bpm speed he uses there in the middle part. Otherwise I just lose it in a big trainwreck.
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Nice stuff. Seems I should just look at Josh’s channel and his tutorials more apart from the bassbuzz videos.
Chugging 8ths at fast speeds works for me now. I practiced that for the band songs. This seems to be a good practice too. I personally don’t like the song much but the bass line is amazingly good.
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Just dropping this here… Great Bass Lines: Hysteria by Muse
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Oh, I never saw this one, I just sort of figured out the fingering and plucking on my own. I do a pretty good, consistent job, at what I assume is full speed, but I never heard this song, or base line until I started watching pedal demo’s on youtube, and there are sooooooooooo many that use this riff.
I actually asked Josh what the base line was, cuz I heard him play 10 seconds of it in one of his BassBuzz videos. He told me the song, gave me the sheet, and pointed me to his video of the cover, but I never found this one, I will have a look, I am sure it will help, and I will find corrections to what I may have learned wrong.
But even so, I do pretty good with this song, and I love it cuz of the constant chugging.
That is also why I am starting to learn some Sublime songs, lots of chugging in Date Rape, but it plays all over the neck, and has some full speed chugging / hammer on fills that are a struggle to learn.
But so rewarding when you do.
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Full speed would be 93BPM 16th notes, so slow drum beat but relatively fast bass chugging.
It can be hard to realize how fast it is because the the open string chugs get a little hidden by the fretted ones - it’s basically twice as fast as it originally might sound.
Figuring it out is pretty easy (the tabs come with the course), it’s just working up the relentless chugging endurance for the whole song that is much harder.
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