How to Slap Bass with Victor Wooten | Bass Lesson

[Music] all right slapping the bass or thumping and plucking as larry graham would say it the main thing i want to start with is saying that don't over focus on the technique focus more on the rhythm and the feel right because that's what people are going to dance to they're not going to stop and look at your technique they just want it to feel good let's start with my my right hand or my picking hand my thumping hand there's a bunch of different ways to do it there are no right ways or wrong ways it's only right if it grooves if the technique's good but the groove is off then you're doing it wrong here's a few ways to do it with the thumb you're just going to hit the string you can hit the string and bounce off of it right see how my thumb is pointing up that's only one way and believe it or not i don't do it that way but a lot of people do it's not right or wrong until you make good music with it so you can have your thumb going up you can have your thumb going sideways and i'm still bouncing off the string right now some people point their thumb downwards and and twist the wrist this way doesn't matter how you do it again it's the rhythm that you get with it now that you have those three different ways straight up sideways down i use the sideways approach and i don't bounce off the string not normally i don't pull away from the string i do the same way i do it with my fingers when i'm plucking with my fingers i don't hit and pull away i go through the string if i'm going to play the a string my finger goes through and stops on the e string so here if i'm going to thumb thump the e string my thumb goes through and stops on the a and now when we get into the double thumb exercise you'll see why going through the string for me makes sense so whether i'm back here off the fingerboard or on the fingerboard my thumb goes through the string totally up to you whether you want to bounce or go through i like to go through the key here is to practice hitting the string you want to hit okay so once you've done this a few times on each string even when i go through my high string my thumb goes through and rest on the body so just practice getting a good sound on each string [Music] now when you know what to do not once you're good at it don't wait until you're good as soon as you know what your hand is supposed to do add rhythm to it one two three four [Music] the rhythm always helps you now hit it twice [Music] make it feel good [Music] now you may notice or may not my left hand is kind of dampening the strings if it didn't you'd hear that's less musical right so i'm holding down just lightly muted note is coming from my left hand right and you can determine by the left hand how much you want it to dampen [Music] and as you can see i i lift up and then dampen really quickly so that's a technique that you want to practice and get comfortable with okay the main key to all of this is once you learn the technique add rhythm to it make music with it don't wait until you're good at the technique that the adding music to it will make the technique get better right it's like if you want to learn to swim don't spend a whole lot of time on the side of the pool get in the water okay the water will help you learn to swim so get in the music once your right hand or or even if you're left-handed once your thumping hand slapping hand is getting a little comfortable now we want to start adding notes okay it's easy to thumb in the key of e because it's a low string and then we pluck the high string there's a lot of videos that show you how to do that i'm going to show you something slightly differently i want you to learn how to finger any note you want so we all know about playing scales play scales with the thumb i'm going to play a g major scale third fret e string i'm going to thumb the low g then i'm going to pluck the seventh the fifth fret sorry on the d string fifth fret g and i'm going to play a g major scale that way [Music] notice that i'm doing it in rhythm go down the scale if you want to hit the open a g sharp [Music] and just go through scales right you can do chromatic skills just to make sure that you're playing comfortably every note you just want to be able to make sure you can play every note not just one key okay not just the key of e the next thing i would ask ask you to do two thumbs one plug [Music] okay last part instead of hitting the high g like that instead of hitting the octave i'm going to flatten my index finger and hit that note on the d string and hammer the g now i'm going to go through skills that way [Music] as you see a little bit harder right but it just takes a little bit of practice the thing now is we've got the technique even a little bit down we want to add feel to it okay so those are a few things that you can do to get you started on thumping and plucking or slapping if you want to call it that the key make good music thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 357,626

Keywords: Sweetwater, cat:bass, victor_wooten, how_to, demo, review, tutorial, lesson, guide, free_bass_lesson

Id: 75Qg6dfL6x8

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021