If you’re doing the Beginner to Badass course, this lesson will fit any ol’ where, since you don’t have to do any playing. And rest assured we’ll be covering all the ‘proper’ technique you need in the course.
Hope y’all enjoyed this one! I know a few people here will be very pleased about the Peter Hook appearance.
I like the teacher Josh character and songs in the end.
As always good advice.
Josh said the guitar video was inspiration for the bassbuzz video but somehow it feels to me like internal eyerolling when students say “but X does it, too.” was just as much inspiration
Breaking rules creates innovation. First slap and pop was breaking the rules. First tapping was breaking the rules, etc. We have to remember that the modern electric bass is only about 70 years old. Still way too new to have rules in any case. It’s still being defined.
I’ve never understood how anyone can fret properly with their bass (or guitar) slung below their waist. I typically extend my straps to the max, which puts the body of the bass just about at waist level, but can’t see me playing it any lower than that.
That did sound pretty cool. However that wouldn’t work super well in the actual song I think (and definitely loses the iconic sound of it.)
And maybe even better examples would be “She’s Lost Control” or “Perfect Kiss”, or really many others with him. Moving either of those down would lose the main driving melody in the song. He just lives up there in the higher registers, chorusing away.
Haha, I was betting money that was going to show up on the list, but lo, it wasn’t.
I think the overarching theme of the video could be taken for flying fingers, though. If you sound great, then you do you. If you don’t, then you might want to change your technique. In the end, you might be robbing yourself of some efficiency, but if you’re making it part of your technique and (as others said) getting some sort of innovation out of it, then that’s cool.
Prime example for me is the “flat fingers”. I don’t always have flat fingers, but when I slap, I often do, and it creeps into my non-slap playing as well. But it’s because at this point in my bass journey, I have opted to keep my hand at a neutral-muted position. and that often makes my fingers flatten out. Slapping/popping causes a lot of harmonics, and I like to play with ghost notes, so keeping my hands as a sound-damper in the interim and turning them “on” when I wanted to hit a note was a technique that worked best for me. Again, maybe you wouldn’t call this completely flat-fingered, but that’s kinda how it looks. “Maak” did a video about it:
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