How many basses go in each mid-life crisis?
It’s a funny term, as I don’t see it as a crisis…unless the bass or sax I want is not available.
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Trying to do the slap thing. I hold my bass at 45 degree angle so cant do the thumb up. I can sort of do a ‘slap through’ where i graze the string with my thumb on the downstroke , but i don’t really do that right either because i am flapping my wrist. Thumb down is doable but no accuracy and i bounce too much.
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Inhereted by father inlaws old barry. I was trained on clarinet and bass cl. Any tips on how to relax my embouchure
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- Pretend you are saying the word ‘victory’. The ‘v’ part of victory - that sound, is how your lips should be.
- When you blow, think ‘fogging a mirror’ vs. blowing a birthday cake candle.
What strength reed are you using?
What tip opening mouthpiece?
If these are not good sizes for a beginner, you could be making yourself blow your head apart trying to hard. Bari takes a LOT of air, start around middle C.
Check out the Better Sax YouTube channel beginner playlist videos, they are great…
If you end up liking it and wanting to learn, Jay’s paid courses are the best place, he is to sax what Josh is to bass.
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Clarinets are generally pointed down vs. the outward direction of sax. It takes some getting used to but you will find sax is MUCH easier in the embouchure department (and less cats will be outside your window when you play).
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Maybe thats my prob…i play with the reed on my lip…not my teeth
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Reed goes on your lip.
Teeth go on top of mpc.
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If you have to tense up to get the notes to sound, its most likely a mpc/reed size/strength combo.
You should start with a VERY soft reed. 1.5 or 2.
You will move up quickly but bari is a very different beast due to all the air you need.
Tip opening I would start with a 105 or 110 biggest.
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just open string and mute it with your fretting hand, then open string and mute with fretting hand, over and over and over, then when you get the E string sounding right, go to the A slap / mute / slap / mute / slap / mute, over and over and over until you start to get the feel for it.
You need to get the feel for it, once you get the feel for it, it will sound right.
This could take an hour a day on the E string for a week, or it could take 10 minutes.
But
the feel on the E string doesn’t work for me on the D and G string, it is a slightly different feel on those two strings then on the E and A. that could be just me, or others might find the same thing.
at first it feels like you need to put more effort into hitting the string, especially on the D and G string, but you really don’t need to hit it hard, you need to just get the right strike. like cracking a whip, you do the motion over and over and over, and eventually, you start to get a crack at the end.
like snapping somebody in the arse with a towel, or a limpy to the head, once you figure it out, its like you always knew, but until you do, it seems like you will never get it.
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This is helpful @T_dub!
I figured this out by try & error but feared to adopt just a new bad habit.
Muting E and A string with the fingertips of the left hand is kinda contradiction of what we learned before. We are trained to touch just the string we wanna play, not the lower sounding string too. All of a sudden it’s vice versa and a voice in my head screams ‘Don’t do that’.
I do a 20 min slap workout every day. I will intensify attention on left hand muting.
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I too struggle with slapping…cant do the thumb up way because of how i angle my bass. I can do the open E…but cant seem to hit the other strings wirh accuracy and without hitting strings below. I wind up doing more a thumb pluck than a bounce
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Patience grasshopper, this takes a while (unless you are a kid, then it takes 3 minutes).
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I’m not so much struggling with this as I am wondering about it. When I’m playing, there’s a very short momentary buzz as I’m lifting my fingers off of each string. It lasts for probably a quarter of a second but I still hear it. Is this a normal part of playing the bass and something to ignore, or can it be avoided.
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This is technique, you will get better at it and learn how to lift far and fast enough to mute (generally aided by another finger or two even) or come off cleanly. It happens, you will get there. It will go away, it will come back when you get lazy, and go away again etc. until your fingers do it properly without thinking.
Play around with it as an exercise using one note (say G on E string, 3rd fret, nice big chunky E string to wrangle).
How much lift/pressure makes it buzz?
How much keeps the note ringing?
How much mutes the note?
How much let’s the string ring when you don’t want it too (too far off)?
Then try it with quarter notes on a beat with a metronome or drum machine very slowly at first until you nail it, then start creeping the bpm up little by little.
You can do this a few minutes a day for a while and you will notice it going away and your ear/finger connection doing the work…
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Yes, technique like John said, can help with this, as well as different settings on your EQ or Tone knob, compressors, and just time and skill, but the bass, especially in rock, metal, punk etc… is never as clean by itself as it is in the mix. Anytime you isolate bass tracks, you will hear a lot of things you do not hear in the mix at all, BUT if they were not therein the mix, the bass would also not sound as hard and driving, it would sound a lot tamer, so it depends what you are going for overall.
If you want to play a lot of clean jazz, then technique for years, will get you there.
You can also get fret wrap, or a bridge mute (foam under the strings).
There are lots of reasons for it, ways to stop, or reasons to keep it. And I don’t mean just down right sloppy play, but there is a bit of string cracking and some string buzzing, when you really dig in.
but when you want to play some blues and just play the baseline, just do simple exercises, run scale, triads, 1234 1234 1234 1234 from E to G and back, etc…
Doing a lot of those around the 9th to 12th can be easier and not such a finger stretcher, but it is good to practice in both areas IMO.
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Another general rule of thumb is: if you can’t hear it through the amp or audio interface, it doesn’t matter 
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Thanks @John_E , @T_dub , you’ve explained it so well. Just like anything else, it gonna take some time. I appreciate your input. 
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Under Pressure.
I have the main rhythm down. D D D DD A, then it shifts to D on the E string, C, B,
And then it shifts to G on the E string and eighth notes. And in the simplest section of the song, I lose the groove.
Maddening
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Elbow locking. Whenever I move fast below the 4th fret my elbow simply locks and I have to wait a couple of minutes for it to loosen a bit. So, I guess I will restart my B2B journey from the beginning to strengthen it a bit.
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You’re missing a D in there.
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