[bass riffage] I'm gonna show you the basic
right hand plucking technique for bass, and we're actually gonna play a little music together as we learn it. So, for starters, take your right thumb and place it on the edge of your pickup. You might have two pickups like I do, you might just have one,
doesn't really matter, just find a spot for your thumb, and that's gonna help anchor your hand so that you can consistently
find where the strings are. And then for actually plucking, we're gonna use our
index and middle fingers. We're gonna do something
called alternating plucking on bass, which just means
we go back and forth, index, middle, index, middle. This is really cool because
it allows you to play stuff that sounds really fast but your fingers don't actually have to
be moving that quickly because they're alternating
the work that they do. Let's try doing a few
plucks on the E string. So rest your thumb on the pickup, and then just pluck that big, fat string, closest to your face, that's the E. E A D G. Give that some plucks,
index, middle, index, middle, back and forth, doesn't have
to be in rhythm with me, just make sure you're hearing some sound. Now, here's the big tip about plucking, I'm gonna show you this at a
high-tech, super special angle. Don't pull up and away from the bass like this when you pluck. A lot of times, beginners wanna do that. What you wanna do is pull
across towards your thumb. So when you pluck the E string, your thumb's resting on the pickup. Your fingers are actually
hitting your thumb after you pluck, so you're
moving along the plane of the bass, kinda like a little dude just walking on the bass. So, across, not this. See the difference? If I pluck the A string, I
actually hit the E string after each pluck, see that? So, if you pluck the A
string and you do not touch the E string after you
pluck, you're pointing up and away from the bass,
which you don't wanna do because it thins out your tone and it just doesn't give
you the sound of the bass that you really want. So, if you're plucking
the G, D or the A string, you should hit the next
lowest string after you pluck. If you're plucking the E string,
you should hit your thumb. That's true of index and the middle, same plucking direction. Just pulling across, not this thing. Just straight across. Like a little walking
dude, doo pa doo pa doo. So pulling across instead
of up is gonna give you a big difference in your tone. It's gonna make you sound
a lot less like a beginner even if you are one, which is great. So that's the basic plucking technique, now we're going to play
some music with it. Before I teach you how
to play this groove, let's just take a listen,
and get in our ears, and then we'll start playing it. [play that funky music white boy] Okay, this is gonna be
really straightforward. We're just gonna pluck open strings, we're not gonna fret any
notes with the left hand. And here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do four plucks
on our open E string. So, give that a try just out of rhythm, just go index, middle,
index, middle on E string. Then we're gonna do the
same thing on the A string. Four plucks, so try this with me, and again, don't worry about the rhythm. Index, middle, index, middle, then we're gonna go back to the E string. Index, middle, index,
middle, to the A string, index, middle, index, middle. And that's gonna be the whole groove. Just back and forth
between those two strings. And this may seem a little bit simple, but a lot of bass lines
really are this simple and this is a great chance
to work on this technique a little bit and play some
music while you're doing it. So before we play with the track, let's try doing this together in rhythm but without the track, you and me. So I'm gonna count one, two, three, four, and then we're gonna do our
plucks on one and three. So let me just demonstrate. We're gonna go, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four,
one, two, three, four one, two, three, four and then we repeat. So each note lasts for two counts. We go one, two, three, four. And we're not playing on two and four, we're just letting the note ring. Got it? Okay, so pluck on one, pluck
on three every single time. I'm gonna count to four
and then we'll start. Ready? One, two, three, four. Pluck two pluck four,
index two, index four. To the A string, pluck two three four, one, two, three, four,
back to the E string. Index, two, middle, four. Index, two, middle, four. A string, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Let's finish on the E string pluck. Nice. So, one last thing before
we play this with a track which is after you finish on the A string and you start plucking the E string, you might notice that your A string is still ringing like this,
so I pluck the A string. And then I go to the E string. Well hear how both of those
strings are ringing right now? I don't really want that. So, if you can handle
this difficulty wise, after you're done with the A string and you start plucking the E string, just touch the A string
with your left hand and that'll stop it from ringing. So you're just getting the E string. Just make sure you don't touch
the E string as you do that otherwise, you're gonna mute
the note that you do want, you just wanna mute the
note that you don't want. All right, all the preliminaries
are out of the way, we're ready to have a disco-tastic time. We're gonna start with
this at a slow speed, then we're gonna do a
medium and then we'll do the full speed that you
heard in sneak peek. So you'll get to kinda work
out your speed on this. Here we go. We're gonna get four
counts and then we're in it in one, two, three, four. Pluck, two, pluck, four. Pluck, two, pluck, to the A string. Pluck, two, pluck, four. Pluck, two, pluck, to the E string. Pluck, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Pluck, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. All right, we're gonna move
on to the medium speed. If you need more practice on the slow, you can just head to BassBuzz.com and there are extended versions
of all these play-alongs at all of the speeds, so you can get some more practice there. All right, here we go with medium. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. A string, three, four. One, two, three, E string. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. A string, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. All right, here comes the full speed and we're gonna jam on this a
little bit longer this time. And remember, to touch the A string after you switch back to the E string so that you only have one
string ringing at a time. If you can think of that
many things at once. If not, just have fun,
don't worry about it. Okay, here's the full speed. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. A string, three, four. One, two, three, four. E string. One, two, three, four. A string. Pluck, pluck. All right, awesome work on that. Hope you enjoyed whipping
out your bell bottoms and remember that you can play
along with extended versions of all these speeds at BassBuzz.com and there's also a no-bass
track version of the full speed if you wanna be the only
bass player on the track.
