I watched an interview with Victor Wooten where he was talking about the best way to learn a new technique. His advice was to start making music with it as soon as possible. I’m paraphrasing here, but he meant that as soon as you can make anything resembling musical notes with the technique, you need to start working it into a song, not just do drills. This little insight helped me get “unstuck” with slap/pop. I wasn’t getting anywhere slapping quarter notes to a metronome. But after making up some simple slap grooves and playing them over a drum loop I started actually feeling the technique, and it became less mechanical, and more like, well…music!
So following this advice, I came up with a couple slap lines to work into this cover. Now I have a long way to go on the slap bass journey, but I’m psyched to be at least comfortable sharing what’s here. Not too long ago it was incoherent nonsense.
TECH NOTE: Compressors confuse the crap out of me! I ended up not using one because I felt it sucked the life out of my playing, but wanted to because of the drastic volume difference between the slapping and plucking. I need to experiment with this more. I was working with the Reacomp effect in Reaper. I tried the “Spanky Bass” preset which did a good job taming the peaks, I just got lost/frustrated messing with the parameters to try restoring more of the dynamics.
Thanks for listening!