Everyone does this!
I also do this!
Especially if I get excited about a cool part.
This is why I always have massive respect for the bassists who look so confident that they look mean and bored, backing up some band, just laying it back and dropping perfect time into the deepest of pockets.
Timing will improve as your confidence in your hands and ears and playing improves.
If you worry about timing, just put on a drum beat and play open Es to the beat.
If that is off, you have a problem with timing, or you get nervous if you think about timing, and it’s a rhythm/too-much-thinking problem.
But if you can play the open E in time, everything else is a learning curve / new information / nerves problem, which - over time - will improve so that simple bass lines will be as easy to play as the open E, and then intermediate lines become as simple as the open E, until the confidence and experience stacks up to make most bass playing feel simple.
That’s the goal, anyway.
So they tell me.
Actually having started on a acoustic I never had the pickup to rest my thumb on, so even that’s a bit of an adjustment I’m making here as well, and it’s further back than I’ve been plucking on the acoustic, but it’s good I’m getting exposed to different geometries early, it just threw me off to begin with.
Oh yes I forgot about that one. I had to really concentrate at first to rest my thumb on the pickup I could do the resting on the E string no problem but when I went to pluck the E I just had my thumb floating about randomly! I’ve actually considered (and am still considering adding a thumb rest to my acoustic!)
Before picking up a bass for the first time in decades, I was playing country blues fingerstyle guitar exclusively. Not “country” music, but country blues originals by pioneers like Robert Johnson, Mance Lipscomb, Reverend Gary Davis, etc.
Country blues fingerpicking is built on the foundation of playing alternating bass with your thumb (think left hand stride piano) as 3-4 fingers play the melody. It’s a workout for the picking hand, for sure!
Anyway, in this style of playing, the thumb acts independently of the rest of the fingers of the picking hand. As such, on bass I found the concept of anchoring my thumb totally foreign and very limiting.
So I blew it off.
I don’t anchor on a pup and very rarely on a string. I float my thumb to mute unwanted notes ringing out, as 5-string players do, even though I play 4-strings exclusively.
Just goes to show that guitar playing experience can directly affect how some folks approach playing bass.
I do both now. For most rock stuff I anchor, but I’m also attempting some classical pieces and then I have to pick much more like I did with that blues stuff, using thumb and first two fingers.
Yeah, Stefan Grossman! I had about a dozen of his tapes/workbooks. They were essential to my learning note-by-note country blues tunes. He’s a great teacher and player.
Please see end of measure 40- start of measure 41. I understand there is is a slide from fret 11 on the g string going fret 5 on the D. How is this supposed to get accomplished?
looking at it again, maybe it is not a slide to fret 5 on D…(short slide symbol-notes are not linked). At any rate don’t know where to slide to and then get to Fret 5 on D out of a slide.
It’s just a slide all the way down the G string (giggity). You would slide from 11 to 1. The next note after the slide is the 5th fret on D. You can do a slide from 11 on G to 5th on D, You’d just start at 11, slide down and hop strings as you get to the 5th fret.
Would it sound right just sliding to the open G and don’t bother with the 5th fret D? The next note is also on the G string so it’s not a risk of the sound carrying too long.
Absolutely it would, and in this case would have made more sense. I was just using the frets from her example to explain how she would do it. They won’t always resolve to an open string and the string hop at the end of the slide would be how she would go about doing that.
Ok, I thought I would have my timing issues under control. Little did I know…
I just made a little muting thingy, by rolling some neoprene and putting it under the strings near the bridge. That works absolutely great - better than any foam solution I tried before (and I tried a lot).
With reduced sustain, the truth came out quickly: my timing still s#cks big time.
I will leave the neoprene role attached for some time, as it forces me to have more discipline and not play as sloppy as I appear to be doing…
Exactly what my bass teacher told me. Every day now, I play to a metronome for about 10 mins as a warmup. Just alternating fingers, 8 strokes on each string, then switching, no fancy scales or nothing, just a steady rhythmic pulse.
Mark has me thoroughly trained to tap my foot and count in my head all the time and it’s really helped a lot. I still struggle with allowing enough sustain between notes if I have to make crazy string jumps just because I don’t have enough time…but that’s something I’m working on.
I could do the resting on the E string no problem but when I went to pluck the E I just had my thumb floating about randomly! I’ve actually considered (and am still considering adding a thumb rest to my acoustic!)
