["The Awakening"] Listening to Primus was
a huge inspiration for me when I first started playing bass. This is me my sophomore
year of high school butchering Les Claypool's
arrangement of Master of Puppets. So whether you're just a fan of Primus or you're looking to
improve your bass game, here are seven reasons why I
think Les Claypool is awesome, including bass lesson tips you can use to sound weird like Les. [BassBuzz Intro] When I first heard Les slapping on tunes like My Name is Mud or Hamburger Train I was just like WUUTTTTTTTT That sounds so crazy! He must be doing some weird,
crazy, weird slap technique. But can I tell you a secret? His technique actually isn't that weird. And if you can nail
some slap fundamentals, you can actually nail
a lot of Primus riffs. Les was influenced by slap grandmasters Larry Graham and Louis Johnson. And if you look side by side, you can see his slap hand is
moving in the same basic way. Les' slap technique arsenal
includes slaps with the thumb, pops with the index finger, which is basic stuff that
I teach you how to do in my Idiot-Proof Slap video. He also uses a lot of hammer-ons, As well as fretting hand slaps, which is where you smack
your fretting fingers against the strings, which
makes this percussive sound that allows you to do two hand
drumming kind of patterns. So what makes his slap
lines sounds so unique? Well, one thing is his quirky patterns. A lot of slap lines just go
slap-pop on a bunch of octaves, which you can hear all over the place from Larry Graham's Earthquake- To Freddy Washington on Forget Me Nots. To Flea on Tell Me Baby. But you'd be pretty hard pressed to find basic slap pop octaves in a Primus song. Take something like Lacquerhead from 1999's Antipop record. Most of this bassline
doesn't even have any notes, it's just a cool percussive pattern that alternates slap, fretting
slap, pop, fretting slap. With some funky hammer ons thrown in, which sounds like this. One, two, three, four. The second thing that stands
out about Les' slapping is he's very, very fast. Check out the solo break in Lacquer Head, he's playing another
cool drumming pattern- But at like breakneck speed,
which sounds like this. One, two, three, four. By the way, I tabbed
out all the Primus riffs in this video for you
in a Noteflight score if you want to mess around
with these on your own later. The link is in the description. So where should you start if
you want to slap like Les? One, think rhythm first and
just start messing around with some patterns you like
between your slaps, your pops, your fretting slaps, your hammer ons- And two, once your
fundamentals are in place you can start working
up your speed gradually 'cause the secret to
being able to do this- Is to be able to do this. And work your speed up over time. But we're still missing one big piece of Les' slap approach, and
that's his signature strumming. So gently strum that like button if you're enjoying this and make sure you tap
subscribe for more bass le- okay, I'll stop. Most bands don't really have bass chords, we just kind of dutifully
play one note at a time. But Primus has many,
many, many bass chords. Les has a couple cool
but simple chord shapes he uses the most, which is good news for those of us trying to hone
our Les Claypool impressions. **Say baby do you want
to lay down with me?** Les' most used shape is
the mighty power chord. If you watched my bass shapes video, you'll recognize this is just a root, a fifth, and an octave all played at once. This shape is super versatile, it works on major and minor chords, and it's not too difficult to play. An easy Primus riff you can
get started on these with is Here Come the Bastards from
Sailing the Seas of Cheese. To strum these chords,
Les just anchors his thumb to either the side of the neck or the low string he's not using, and then strums up and
down with his fingers, which sounds like this. One, two, three, four, five. What makes these power
chords sound really Les-y is when he combines the strumming
with his slap technique. Check it out on John the Fishermen from the Frizzle Fry album. This line starts with just
some strummed power chords sliding around, which is a great way to wear all the skin off of your pinky. And then he switches to
slapping for some single notes and then back to the
strums, back and forth, and it all sounds like this. One, two, three, four. What gets tricky with this technique is switching back and forth
between the slaps and the strums more quickly like he does in Tommy the Cat from Seas of Cheese. This line starts with a quick
strum or two at the beginning, and then he quickly shifts into more standard slap gear for the remainder. And it's even harder on a
six string fretless bass like he originally played it on. Let's see if I can make
it through this alive. The other chord shape
that Les seems to favor I like to call the Batman shape. Because it gives you the
old Batman theme song. ♪ Na, na, na, na, na,
na, na, na, Batman! ♪ Not like this newfangled
Christian Bale Batman, I mean like old-school Adam West Batman. This shape is heavily
featured in Too Many Puppies from Frizzle Fry, another
great slap and strum riff that sounds like this. One, two, three, four. If you want to get chording like Les, start by just practicing
some simple slap, strum, slap, strum, back and forth
to get the coordination and try out some power
chords or some Batman shape and put it all together
and you can come up with a pretty decent rip-off
Primus-y kind of riff. But what the hell notes is Les putting on all
those slaps and strums? That's what we'll talk about next. With most of the bands and bass players that I break down for you on this channel, it's pretty easy for me to say, oh, they were using this scale on this chord in this key, bada bing, bada boom. KRUSTY: Bada bing, bada boom, I'm done. But that is NOT how the notes
and harmony work in Primus. Part of what makes them different is the frequent use of dissonance. Some combinations of notes
most of us would agree sound nice and pretty or consonant. Other note combos sound
more intense and jarring, which we call dissonant. So Primus leverages these
more dissonant note combos to get their signature weird sound. Check out the main riff from Fisticuffs from 1998's Brown album. We have two gnarly dissonances
featured in this bassline. The first one is called a
tritone, or diminished fifth, which makes this nice shape up a string and up a fret from your starting note, and we'll revisit that shape later when we talk about Les' tapping lines. We've also got some heavy
use of the minor second, or half step, which is
just moving one fret. And that sounds super heavy with the notes played one
after the other like this, or even clashier if you were to play those
notes simultaneously. [extreme bass face] Here's what this riff
sounds like in the song, it's completely filthy. One, two, three, four. Compare that to a less dissonant bassline like Money by Pink Floyd, which I've moved up to the
same key as Fisticuffs. I chose this song to compare because it starts with
a very similar shape to the Fisticuffs riff. In Money we descend from that
octave down to the fifth, then down to the root and
then we play some cool, but easy to digest, minor
pentatonic scale notes. It's super chill, right? You could groove along
to that bassline all day. But in Fisticuffs, we swap that fifth for that nasty tritone. And then we get some equally
nasty minor second action in place of those pentatonic notes. And now it's like, whoa,
we're not chilling, we're at an evil carnival and we're gonna die! or something. You'll also see these dissonances in most of the other riffs
we look at in this video, not to mention all of Larry LaLonde's super cool and quirky guitar parts. I love how these guys
dare to get super weird and dissonant with their note choices, because if nobody ever went
outside of the right notes, we wouldn't get to listen to Primus, it would all just sound like this. [I'm so sorry I just had to do this] [I thought it would be funny] [I hope you don't get nightmares] So you can create feeling and music without following the rules, it's just gonna be a really weird feeling. For established styles of music, yes you're gonna need some standard scales and chord progressions. If you want to play blues, you need to know the 12 bar blues, if you want to play country, you're gonna need to play
some roots and fifths. And that's why I cover common harmony and chord progressions and stuff in my Beginner to Badass course, to get you rolling with just
standard normal, popular music. But if you just want to
sound wild and weird, then go way outside the box and just get weird and dissonant with it. I don't know if that's
going in the video... Well this just wouldn't be a
very good Les Claypool video if we didn't talk about
some tapping stuff. Tapping is where you
smack the strings down onto the fretboard so you can
play notes with both hands rather than having to pluck. But you won't hear Les doing any like Van Halen style tapping where the notes all flow
in the same melodic lines. That kind of thing. His approach is more chordal and rhythmic where the hands are kind of trading off. Kind of like the slap drumming patterns we were looking at earlier, which means that neither hand
ever has to work too hard, 'cause you're trading back and forth. You can see this play out on the main riff from the Pork Soda album track DMV, which is a song I relate
to having probably gone to some of the same terrible
DMV locations as Les in the north San Francisco Bay area. The fretting hand is interjecting some low notes periodically, so what would normally
be your plucking hand is only hitting three notes in
a row at the most, like this. One, two, three, four. Also remember the tritone, that dissonant shape
we talked about earlier where your notes are one
string and one fret apart? Les loves to use that
shape for the high notes in his tapping lines, which is
because of the quirky sound, but probably also 'cause
it's a nice natural shape for your fingers to make on the neck. You can see that shape in DMV, and also in probably his
most famous tapping line Jerry Was a Race Car Driver. Both of these songs were originally played on the six string fretless, by the way, but I'm adapting them to four strings so you can still play them
without a big, crazy bass. So the tritones played up here
take the focus in this line and they get broken out by some taps and hammer ons in the fretting hand. And that sounds like this. Wow, playing that riff makes me feel like I just landed a Kickflip McTwist. So if you want to fake
a Primus tapping vibe with no theory required, just grab that tritone shape
with your plucking hand, throwing in some random
notes with the other hand, drum back and forth, and you'll have a pretty convincing, powdered, rehydrated version of Primus. [Les] "What drives me is
experiencing new things, new music or new musicians,
or just a new challenge. I like turning over rocks
and looking for the new, whatever's new for me, it's exciting." I really admire Les'
commitment to creativity, even when it might've
cost him fame or fortune. Take his choice to put Primus on hiatus after the 1999 Antipop record. "I remember towards the
end of the 90s with Primus feeling that the well had
dried up on all levels, personally, creatively, enthusiastically. Getting away from the band
and doing other things was the smartest thing I
did for my creativity." I don't know about you, but I actually love the Antipop record, it doesn't sound like a dry well to me, but it's cool that Les had the wisdom to go find creative juice elsewhere and not just keep milking
the money machine. As he says, "it's a smart business move to nurture your brand and stick to it, but for me it wouldn't have
been a smart move creatively." Of course, Primus got
back together eventually, but Les has kept it spicy
with a ton of other projects over the years, including Colonel Les Claypool's
Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, Oysterhead with Trey Anastasio
and Stewart Copeland, Colonel Claypool's
Bucket of Bernie Brains, with Buckethead and Bernie Worrell, Duo de Twang, and most recently The Claypool Lennon
Delirium with Sean Lennon. So what's the takeaway for those of us who aren't 10 years deep
into a super successful band and needing to diversify
our creative projects? The lesson I take from this is sometimes creativity needs space. Taking breaks and trying
new angles can allow fresh ideas to come in so
you don't get burnt out. If you apply this to bass
playing and practice, maybe that means taking
a break from your scales if they're becoming stales
and do something fun, like some Bach or... something
that you think is fun. I think Bach is fun. If you're sick of your
ear training practice, maybe try taking a break
and just like listen to a whole record without
multitasking, uninterrupted. Seriously, like when's the
last time you did that? Take a page from the Les Claypool book and when you're facing
burnout, give it some space. Primus was often lumped
in with other alternative kind of rocky, funky bands in the 90s like the Chili Peppers and Fishbone. But if you listen to just the bass, you can hear that tone wise, Les didn't really sound like anyone else. You can nail the strums and the slaps and the weird notes and the taps, but to truly rip off a Primus riff you need to copy that
Les Claypool bass tone. His gear and sound has
kind of shifted around over the years, but one thing
has remained consistent, at least to my ear. The bass tone always kind of
matches the sound of his voice. This is a cool thing I've never noticed with any other singing bass player, but if you listen to Les' bass by itself- And then listen to him sing- There's a nasal mid-rangy
quality that they both share. Like if you're talking and you want to do your
Les Claypool impression, which I can't get enough of, then you just gradually shift your voice up, up, up into our nose until it's like hello Mr. Krinkle. [Kermit approves] And you can do the same
kind of Les impression on a bass guitar by shifting to the pickup that's
closest to the bridge, which is a sound that's
typically characterized as being nasal. On Les' main Carl Thompson
basses, the pickup, which translates the
vibration of the strings into the sound you hear, is approximately where the bridge pickup on a Fender Jazz is placed. Even if you're not a bass tone nerd, you'll still be able to
hear how crucial this mid-rangy nasal sound is
to the overall Primus vibe. Let's test it out on the
verse from Tommy the Cat that doesn't usually have bass on it so you can hear it in the mix. Here's the standard jazz bass sound where you're hearing 50/50 the signal from the neck pickup
and the bridge pickup, that sounds like this. It sounds kind of out of place, right? It's a good, solid bass
tone, but it's just really not what you're used to
hearing in this context. So now let's try it in Les
mode with all bridge pickup, it's going to sound a lot
more nasal and Primus-y. As a bass teacher, I'm
guilty of leading my students towards more classic, standard bass tones. I want you to have good all around tone for a variety of genres
and be able to cover your favorite artists. But if Primus is what you're aiming for, or some other experimental sound, you're gonna need to
go off the beaten track and follow your ear. In a music industry
where he saw other bands compromising their visions
and opting for money, Les Claypool has always chosen
to just be Les Claypool. LES: "I think we were able
to stick to our ideals and not be too terribly dickish about it and that's why we've been able to stick around as long as we have." From the wild sounds,
to the quirky get-ups, to the sweet dance moves,
Les has never been afraid to defy the laws of tradition. [get it?] At the same time he doesn't
force being intentionally weird. According to Les, "I've been
told how weird our music is, but to me it all seems normal." I also love his low key
understated humility, which really comes
across in soundbites like "We're lucky because
people have always wanted to come see us waggle
our fingers and stuff." So thank you Les for all the
great music and inspiration, and thank you for watching me
waggle my fingers and stuff. [Weirdo] You're the guy from the Hamburger Train, right?
