Then there’s obviously “Portrait of Tracy”
harmonics, there’s false harmonics, artificial
harmonics, all of these different ways you
can approach stuff. I love watching Michael
Manring, he just messes with the tuning of
his bass while he’s playing a harmonic and it
knocks it out and the harmonic goes down in
tone and up in tone and goes all over the place
with chord changes, it’s phenomenal.
In the midst of all of that, my brother was a
guitarist and always had picks lying around and
so I thought I’d give it a go. I was one of those
guys growing up that wanted to be a true bass
player, so I was almost like, if you play bass
with a pick you’re a joke. You’re not a bass
player, you’re a guitarist that couldn’t make
it so you picked up a bass. But once I let go
of my pride, I learned that you can play bass
with a pick, there’s nothing wrong with it and it
sounds cool, it’s a different sound again. I don’t
want to box myself into sounding one way and
I don’t want to sound like this or like that. No, I
want to be able to do all things for the people.
I started listening to more alternative bands. down across the strings. I was hitting multiple I love the sound of a bass attack on the strings
Primus was one of the ones that kept popping strings at a time, which was bad, and I’ve since with a pick, listening to people like Muse, the
up, Les Claypool would do a lot of that stuff as had to since relearn, watching different things song “Hysteria” where he’s just going hard at
well, strumming with the back of his fingers. I with players like Mark King and all of these it. There are other people who do that with the
learned how to do that. I was studying double different slap dudes. Now my thumb is going finger style, but there’s just something really
bass at the time trying to be as nice and round parallel with the strings, I do a double thumb. grungy and gritty and powerful about attacking
of a player as possible. Marcus does double thumb pops even. So it’s it with a pick, which I just love. I had to have
just constantly expanding and growing, never a big chat with my older brother who was the
With your plucking hand there are so many settling. Now I’m experimenting with triple pops one who instilled that bass players only play
different ways you can approach just plucking and those kinds of things. with their fingers. I think he said that to me so I
the strings. It’s not just as simple as using the
index and using the middle and going back and
forth, back and forth. You can go around the
bridge like Jaco, you can go around the neck.
You can really dig right into it, getting that funky
sound. Other influences in my life talk about
playing softer. The softer you play the faster you
can play. There are lots of different ways you
can approach that, there’s slap and popping,
which I started out learning from listening to
Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. I’d hold the bass
really low, like down to my knees, because
I was a rock star (laughs), which meant that
I had terrible technique. Now I play with my
thumb parallel but before it was more like an ‘x’
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February 2019
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