[shredding "N.I.B." by
Black Sabbath on bass] Sure, you could learn
Geezer Butler's N.I.B. solo by rote, from a tab,
exactly how he played it on the Black Sabbath record... BUT if you understand the
beginner-friendly fundamentals he used to create it, you'll
be able to jam your own bluesy metal bass solos in the same style. So let's dig into all
of Geezer's cool ideas, minus the [schneef], and get you jamming. Geezer Butler was heavily
influenced by bass players like Jack Bruce of Cream and Noel Redding of the
Jimi Hendrix Experience. These 60s' bass players
were all about jamming, which is more about making
stuff up on the spot while listening to your bandmates than playing a scripted part. Geezer was also a fan of jazz
musicians like Charles Mingus, where improvisation goes
to a whole other level. And if you listen to Geezer
play the N.I.B. solo live, you'll notice he never plays
it exactly the same way twice. That recording we've all
listened to a million times is just how he happened
to play the solo that day. We're gonna learn a few
licks directly from the solo, but we're gonna focus mostly
on what makes them work. That way, you can get
inside the mind of Geezer and step by step learn to jam
your own Geezer style solos. But there's a full tab for
the solo in the description, I wouldn't just leave
you hanging like that. A scale is just a specific
bunch of notes we pick from the 12 notes of the musical alphabet. Each scale has its own flavor and the minor pentatonic
scale is THE scale for imitating Geezer and just Black Sabbath riffs in general. You can hear it in lots of their songs, like "Paranoid" "Behind the Wall of Sleep" and "A National Acrobat". ♪ I'M TALKIN TA YOU ♪ And here's what it looks like. This is an E minor pentatonic scale. There are other shapes you
can use to play the scale, but this is the one Geezer
used to pull off this solo. So let's go quickly through
one way you could finger this. So start with your pinky on the 7th fret of the A
string, that's your root note. Then grab the 5th fret of
the D string with your index, pinky on the 7th fret of the D, then shift up to pinky on the 9th fret, then index on the G string 7th fret, then finish with the
pinky on the 9th fret, then back down the same way. Pinky, index, pinky, pinky, index, pinky. Even if you missed the rest of the video, which you should not do, if you just noodle around on this scale, it already sounds kind of Geezer-y. Add some bendies and some wah in a minute, and you'll be cooking. One more thing with the scale, so you can really wrap
your head around this solo, Geezer also uses the E minor
pentatonic in a lower octave, meaning starting one E lower. This is a little tricky to visualize because we're gonna be missing one note, but if we take our scale shape and move it down one octave, so down two strings, down two frets, we can play all the same notes, except that one note that's
hanging off the fretboard, which should be a low E, so you can just play that as an open E. So if we glue the low range
and the high range together, that gives us this whole
area to explore for our solo. Now let's stick some minor
pentatonic scale notes together to make our own Geezer style mini solo, which we'll keep modifying
in the following steps. So here's our starting point. That doesn't really sound
like music yet, right? It's just kind of a noodle-y mess. That's because these are all good notes, but notes are no good without a groove. Check this out. [plays section from N.I.B.] Sounds good and Geezer-y, right? What about this? [this is horrible] It's the exact same notes, but all of a sudden it sounds like horrible
music store noodling, right? Or maybe Spinal Tap Mark II? DAVID: On the bass, Derek Smalls. He wrote this. [he's like lukewarm water] The difference is groove. Even though it's just
Geezer playing by himself, we can feel a pulse that
we can bob our heads to. And all the rhythms he
plays relate to that pulse, whether it's half notes,
quarters, or eighths. By the way, I teach you
all this basic rhythm stuff in detail in my Beginner to Badass course over at BassBuzz.com, as well as my favorite exercise
for improving your groove. The N.I.B. solo isn't
perfectly metronomic. The tempo fluctuates a bit over time, but it works because we can
feel his intended groove and pulse at every moment,
even when that shifts. We feel it because he feels it. Let's go back to our made-up solo. All we had so far was some notes, so now let's give it some groove. To copy Geezer's vibe, we want to mix a bunch of eighth notes and quarter notes, and this is just one way we could do it, and that would sound like this. You can play it with me if you want to. Here we go, one, two, three, four. So our solo is sounding okay. We've got good notes and good rhythms, but it's still missing a
lot of that Geezer flavor, which we can get by adding in some bends. A bend means fretting a note and then pulling the string
to the side like this, which raises the pitch. You can do it just a little or a bigger band all the
way up to the next note or a huge bend up two notes. Geezer does them all in this solo. Check out this phrase from
the middle of Geezer's solo without any bendies. It's fine, it's a little dry. But if you bend it up, you get way more of that Geezer flavor. If you're a Tenacious D fan, you might think Jack
Black invented the bendy. J.B.: Dude, I did, I told you to do the bendy
every once in a while! But Geezer actually
got it from Jack Bruce. "I saw Jack Bruce do it and
simply copied his technique. "It suited the sort of blues
jams we were doing quite well." To nail a solid bend, it really helps to support
your fretting finger with the other fingers behind it. So if you were trying to bend the 7th fret on the D
string with your pinky, you put down the other fingers and then you have a lot more strength, so you can bend the string further. If you're bending with your index finger, which Geezer does on a lot of the 3rd and 5th fret notes in the solo, you're probably not gonna be
able to bend quite as far, which is fine and just
adds a little flavor without fully changing the note. Now let's put bendies on our solo. So in bar one, let's do a
big juicy bend on beat four on that 7th fret note. So get all your fingers
supporting the pinky there, or you can use your ring finger. And then in bar two, on beat four, we're gonna get just a little
bend on that 5th fret note, which will be a smaller bend since you only have your index finger. Then we'll add one more
in bar three on beat three on that low G on the 3rd fret,
give it some nice attitude. So altogether with the bendies, here's how our solo sounds so far. One, two, three, four. Ozzy, do you reckon people
should click like on this video? OZZY: [not at all high] Yes. And subscribe and ring the bell to hear about new lessons? OZZY: [very soberly] Yes. Sweet, thanks! If you've geeked out on the bass tone on Geezer's N.I.B. solo,
you've probably noticed there's a kind of weird clacky sound. It's so cool. You can't really get that sound with normal bass plucking technique. So there are two Geezer-fications
you must perform. Geezer-fication number one,
smack the string downwards. This is different than
normal bass plucking, where you pull across
the plane of the bass. You get that smack by coming down towards the bass from above. This isn't good for everything, but it gives a nice aggressive sound if you're trying to cop
Geezer or Steve Harris or John Entwistle sort of tones. And Geezer-fication number two, set your plucking hand over
the end of the fingerboard. Changing your plucking position like that has a really big impact on tone, which I talked about more
in my Producer Switch video. But if you combine the downward plucking with the fingerboard position, you can get that cool clacking
against the fingerboard sound that you hear in the solo. If you've seen Geezer live, you'll notice he doesn't
do the second move. Playing over the neck
pickup helps the bass cut through the mix better than playing over the fingerboard. So for live sound purposes, I can see why he'd keep his hand there. But for this studio setting where there's no other
instruments to cut through, he used this fingerboard position to get that distinctive
clacky sound of the solo. So just briefly, if you
listen to me play our solo with normal technique, And now I'll Geezer-ify it
with some downward plucks and the fingerboard position. It's got way more of that N.I.B. Vibe. To complete your Geezer
impersonation, we need to talk gear. There are three things
that'll help you dial in your final N.I.B. tone. Number one, use a Fender
Precision style bass. The position of the pickup gives a signature growl-y
tone that just rocks. Two, use some old dead
strings, which I'm not doing 'cause I just put on these
red strings to copy Geezer. Geezer doesn't use dead
strings anymore either, but in his words, "On the debut album, I was
too poor to buy new strings, so they were always like 10 months old. I'd only replaced them if they broke, so that's what gave the record
that dull flat thud sound." But you can fake the dead string sound just by rolling your tone
knob down a little bit. Finally, number three, the most fun one is to get that wah pedal going, which is what makes that waow-waow sound. "The producer suggested using a wah-wah "to make the solo more interesting. "I borrowed Tony's pedal, simple as that." You don't need to go find
a vintage Tycobrahe wah like Tony Iommi had for $1,200. Any old wah will do fine. I don't even have a proper wah pedal, I'm just using the wah on my Eventide H9 with an expression pedal hooked up. The rhythm that Geezer
moves the pedal up and down changes based on what he's playing, but if you do a mix of
moving it on the quarter note like, waow, woaw, waow, waow, and on the half note like, waow, waow, you'll approximate the sound of the solo. If we put it all together: the minor pentatonic, some groove, some bendies, the right plucking technique and the wah pedal, here's our
final solo in all its glory. One, two, three, four. Seriously, pick some
minor pentatonic notes, stick them to a rhythm, add some bendies, optionally you can dial
in your tone and technique to Geezer mode, and then just go do it. Go have fun right now.
