Solo Bass?

[gitfidler]

A couple with bad marriage problems goes into the shrink's office. They hadn't spoken in years. A couple of sessions later the doc had made no progress. He opens a closet, hooks up his bass, turns on the amp, and plays a bass solo. The couple talks non-stop while he's playing.

The moral: everyone talks through the bass solo.

Force... I like my Whirlwind A/B box, no pops, no noise.

Vic Wooten on YouTube playing 'Norwegian Wood' is amazing.

[Thomas Wilburn]

What's with the bump, Phil?

[Eric VB]

What's with the bump, Phil?

Well it parallels nicely with the thread on Steve Lawson's tour.

click me

[Phil W]

It lets gitfidler in for a decent bass solo joke; and it's a good read; and I've just got used to the Search function; and I wondered if Vince/Kramer had done anything with his project.

[Thomas Wilburn]

Fair enough.

[Rocky McDougall]

Hummmm......Bass solos, ok here my 2 cents worth. Bass solos, I don't like them. I have never done a solo, mainly because I'm not that good of a player. I realize that solos and soloing is very popular these days. I have listened to all the great players going wild on their solos, I greatly admire their ability but it really has no place in the music I love. I must have several hundred Blues and Western Swing albums and I can honestly say that I have never heard one bass solo played on any album. Now, my memory is not very good, but I think I would have remembered something like that. Now Jazz, it always has a solo (if the player is on an upright) not too many bass guitar solos come to mind. I love Jazz, I endure the solos but can't honestly say it helped the song.

Rocky

[Eric VB]

Hummmm......Bass solos, ok here my 2 cents worth. Bass solos, I don't like them. I have never done a solo, mainly because I'm not that good of a player. I realize that solos and soloing is very popular these days. I have listened to all the great players going wild on their solos, I greatly admire their ability but it really has no place in the music I love. I must have several hundred Blues and Western Swing albums and I can honestly say that I have never heard one bass solo played on any album. Now, my memory is not very good, but I think I would have remembered something like that. Now Jazz, it always has a solo (if the player is on an upright) not too many bass guitar solos come to mind. I love Jazz, I endure the solos but can't honestly say it helped the song.

Rocky

Rocky, I admire and respect your very honest reply. As I said earlier on this thread, there's nothing wrong with differing opinions on this topic and most likely anything said here isn't going to sway anyone.

 

However, you mentioned something about melody in another thread. Have you ever heard 4-part harmony sung? (My age is showing, but my reference is Sha Na Na from their TV series from '77-'81. ) Sometimes the bass singer gets to sing at least part of the melody, as in "Get A Job". (Of course I picture Bowzer singing "Get a job" just before everyone else does the "sha na na" part. ) And in a totally different genre Barry White is a successful lead singer; he sings bass.

 

Again, not everyone's cup of tea, but there's nothing sacrilegious about the melody being expressed with bass frequencies.

 

Have you ever tried playing the melody to one of your favorite songs on bass, just for fun? It won't sound the same as when B.B. is singing it, but the melody should still be recognizable. Chances are people would more likely know what you're playing all alone from the melody instead of the bass line.

 

Solo bass isn't exactly the same as playing a bass solo. It's more like trying to play an arrangement of a song on just one instrument: the bass. The emphasis is more on melody. But even a sweet melody begs to be accompanied. Once you've got the melody down the trick is to figure out how to accompany yourself.

 

One approach is given by Stu Hamm's arrangement of "Linus and Lucy" (the Peanut's song) for solo bass. Stu plays the melody, harmony and bass lines simultaneously, all by himself. However, it is technically challenging because he is using a two-hand tap technique.

 

There are other ways to at least give the illusion of a full orchestration through clever arrangement. For example, someone could learn the melody for the "Happy Birthday" song and every so often play a double-stop or chord instead of a single melody note. And (if played well) would give the impression of a very full rendition of the song to the listener.

 

There's nothing inherently new about solo bass. Pianists and guitarists and probably others have been doing it for a long time. The twist is that it's being done on bass now, I think, because Leo Fender finally gave us an instrument that is loud enough.

 

Humans just don't hear bass frequencies as well as higher ones, so we have to be louder just to be perceived as being "as loud". To make matters worse it is impossible to make an acoustic fretted string instrument that is both loud in the bass frequencies and playable by mere mortals. The double bass is actually too small for the frequencies it is meant to reproduce (see Carleen Hutchins work on the violin octet), but you'd have to be an NBA giant to play anything bigger. So it wasn't until the electric bass guitar was born in the '50s that we were finally on equal ground in terms of volume.

 

In terms of range, a standard 6-string guitar has more range than a standard 4-string bass. That's easy to remedy; just add two more strings to the bass. The range of a standard 88-key piano can be surpassed by a 10-string, 24-fret bass. (I think they're up to 12-string bass guitars now.) Although extended range gives more options for arranging, it's still possible to do a lot with just 4 strings.

 

But I admit, our instrument does a marvelous job of providing the bass role in an ensemble. It's a role not well understood by other instrumentalists outside the bass frequencies; sometimes even within. I was shocked to read a thread on the Keyboard Corner recently asking for advice on left hand piano (and the replies it generated)! This is a niche in which our instrument is well suited. There really isn't a need to stray outside of it, but some people do.

 

Rocky, you may be surprised at how well you can play a melody if you try, and how it might just make for a good bass solo. But you don't have to like bass solos or solo bass. You're still all right in my book.

[Rocky McDougall]

RickBassGuy, Thank you for your response, I can't disagree with any of it. I can fully appreciate the talent it takes to do a solo bass show as well as a bass solo in a song. I know there are those great talents that can play anything on a bass. I have listened to quite a few full bass solo songs, it's just not my cup of tea. I love four part harmony as you do. I am old Four Freshman addict, I have all of their music.

To me, the electric bass is a covert instrument. People listening to and loving a certain song, in many cases, don't realize, what they hear that is moving their soul, is the bass. In country dance music, most people would stop dancing if the bass quit playing, and they would not realize why they stopped dancing. I know you and I are coming at this conversation from two opposite directions, and that is OK. Phil W, opened the door and I stepped through. Not meaning to step on anyones toes while doing it.

Rocky

[Phil W]

Rocky, this thread is really about solo bass as opposed to bass solos and RBG puts it well:

 

"Solo bass isn't exactly the same as playing a bass solo. It's more like trying to play an arrangement of a song on just one instrument: the bass. The emphasis is more on melody."

 

There is a separate thread somewhere about the validity or otherwise of (string) bass sols. Your opinion is as vaild as mine and it's good that we don't all like the same thing. You did praise Mike Dimin's solo bass work earlier in this thread however.

 

I think you're right that it's unlikely solo bass or bass solos would be that succesful well in western swing, although there's always an exception to the rule. I can post you a link to a great blues solo by John Patitucci on double bass. I'm confident I'm a decent blues soloist in my main cover band too and I know I can get a positive crowd reaction with a few BB King inspired licks with my own rhythmic feeling.

 

Bass is two things. First and foremost it's a musical function that can be provided by electric bass, upright, guitar, organ, cello, tuba, voice etc. Many great keyboardists and guitarists have little clue how the bass role actually functions and I second RBG as it one of the few times I've been able to add an authoritive voice in the discussions on Keyboard Corner - when they start discussing basslines.

For 99 percent of us, this is what we do and why we play the bass. Many audiences enjoy it and respond to bass function without realising explicitly the power of it. I know many of my best performances (as I saw them) came at gigs where the audience never noticed my playing. They would have noticed if I played badly. The recent BBC series on music develpment and history had four elements: melody, harmony, rhythm and bass and I think that's an appropriate way of analysing music.

As I said, bass is two things. The second is the name of the instrument we choose which may or may not fulfill bass function at any time. Obviously, for most of us, filling the bass role is far and away the most importtant thing we do and soloing or other functions are comparatively irrelevant.

However, for 1 percent of us, we can and do use the bass as an instrument to play music outside of the bass function. We can play anything on the bass; of course, not everyone will like it!

There are many of us on this forum who can do a better job of comping, playing a melody or and soloing on this forum than many guitarists. There are guys who are pushing the boundaries producing beautiful music on solo bass.

I urge you, Rocky, that when Steve Lawson comes to Texas as he will fairly soon. Go and see him play, listen to the music. At his recent living room gig in front of 20-odd guests he wowed the crowd . . .and only two of the audience were bassplayers as far as I know. Many people there said they didn't normally listen to that kind of music but enjoyed the performance - it was about the music, not the athletics or the chops.

In jazz, there have been some bass soloists who've influenced other instrumentalists and played music with heart, soul and feel. Listen to some of the examples from my post on this thread

click

Especially this one by Milt Hinton, don't you love it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm8CnIOIzD4

 

Here's a blues/jazz solo on upright that I enjoyed