You should be able to cleanly fret notes without touching the back of the neck with your thumb at all. In fact this is a nice thing to do at the start of a session to help combat death-gripping a bass.
You’d be surprised how little pressure it takes to fret on a properly set up bass, and a lot of that can come from counterpressure on the bass body with your plucking hand forearm.
Basically, you should be able to just rest your thumb on the back of the neck and use a little pressure with it as needed, but it should not require very much at all.
Looking at the photo your action looks extremely high to me. This bass likely needs a setup. You should be looking at 2-3mm of height above the 12th fret (when fretting the first fret) for a medium-low to medium action height.
You actually don’t - it’s just convenient to. But you can fret just fine (on a bass with a good setup) without touching the back of the neck at all, just with a little counterpressure from the plucking hand’s forearm. And getting in to the habit of fretting with really light pressure will save a lot of hand pain.
It could be that you have too much neck relief. Here’s some pretty straightforward instructions how to check it:
Even though they recommend to get truss rod adjustments done by a professional, it is possible to do it by yourself. You’ll find videos searching on the forum.
Yeah the key is to keep the grip light. I always use my thumb as well, but it’s eye-opening when you have a good setup and realize how little pressure is required.
Just as a point of clarification, counter clockwise loosens the truss rod? Fretting the 12th and 1st frets on my Yamaha, I’ve got no gap whatsoever on 5th fret of either E or G strings. I noticed the past week or so, that I’m getting some wicked fret buzz playing the 1st fret on all 4 strings.
When I first got into Fretless, I found it so difficult to apply vibrato to the strings because unlike bends the vibratos sound much better when articulating side to side and it’s so difficult to do that with thumb pressure behind the neck.
I did the exercise by playing notes thumb off the back of the neck. It took a bit to get used to buts once I had it down my fretting pressure is even lighter.
You still use thumb pressure but it’s quite dynamic and for a just a short burst during the fills or some difficult parts the rest of the time it’s usually very light grip.
Specifically which screws are you turning? Hopefully the allen screws in the bridge saddles, and not the phillips head ones holding the bridge on or for adjusting intonation? Specifically you want to be adjusting these:
(Sorry for the late reply) Ohh, I see. So, you should be lightly using the thumb of your fretting hand as well as the forearm of your plucking hand to balance the neck, but never really pressing hard against the instrument with either?
Looking at other basses, the action on my bass does look pretty high, but I honestly have no point of comparison. I started playing about four months ago, and this is what I’ve been using the whole time xd.
Yes, I am fairly certain I am turning the right screws when trying to lower the action, but it just doesn’t do anything.
The reason the screws for the E-string are so much further out is because I tried just turning them a bunch to see if it made any difference in comparison to the other strings; which it didn’t.
My bass has pretty serious neck dive. As others have explained that’s basically a symptom of the neck and headstock being out of balance with the body of the guitar, so you feel like you have to support the instrument to keep it from falling over. This is a subconscious thing we do, either by holding the guitar up with our fretting hand or putting pressure with our other arm down on the body.
It sounds like that’s what you’re having to do so definitely experiment with the position of your bass and your strap!
This. If we go back to the original problem definition, you said…
So when I’m fretting notes with the left hand, I kind of “counter balance” the force of my left hand pressing down the strings, with my right hand pressing down on the body of the bass.
If you get a setup and they correct the upbow in the neck, you will be able to fret notes with far less pressure. Consequently, you’ll be using far less (or hardly any at all) pressure from your right hand to counterbalance.
The advice about bass position and balance is also good advice, but the more urgent issue is the neck bow. Fix that and reassess.
Here’s the best visual description I could find to clearly illustrate the relationship between the bow of the neck and the distance of the strings from the fretboard. Yours is the top image here, and you want it to be the bottom one after a setup. It will be much easier to play.
Yeah just as the others said, when I saw the distance of the strings to the fretboard in your picture, I really recommend you to intonate your Bass. Adjusting the action’s gonna make a huge difference.
Thanks for the diagram. I just finished loosening my truss rod a quarter turn and raising the action on my Yamaha because of this picture. No more buzz on 1st fret (all 4 strings). The action was way, way too low. I did 3 full turns before it was fully gone.
