The Top 7 BASS TECHNIQUE FAILS (and how to fix them)

[Music] hey guys how's it going scotty from scottsbasslessons.com and today we're talking about technique technique first base technique felt the reason why i want to talk about bass technique fails is because our technique on our instrument is it's kind of like the foundation of everything we do if we get this wrong everything is going to be wrong or 10 times harder than it needs to be so with number one and i'm sure that a lot of you suffered with this suffer with it from like i suffered with it it is flying fingers the dreaded flying fingers okay and i had a real big issue with this when i started out so flying fingers for the most part it happens around the pinky and the the ring finger you'll be playing something such as for an example let's take like a major scale okay something like this [Music] and when your ring finger and your pinky aren't engaged and being used they stick out over here like you want to hang something like a cup of tea or gav what would you hang on there hat coat oh hat they stick out here like just not doing anything okay and that means when we're trying to play a line our fingers have got way more distance to travel so if you want to play any faster lines it's gonna be just way more clunky and just yeah it's gonna complicate things for you okay so flying fingers quick exercise and i'm trying to give you a quick exercise for everything that we covered today but a quick exercise for flying fingers is just you put one two three four four fingers next to each other and assign them to four frets so four fingers four frets okay play four two three four okay then move to the next one one two three four next one one two three four next one one two three four now when you're doing it it's really important that when you hold that index finger down you concentrate on having these fingers curled over here and engaged ready to play they're not out here one two three four next string one when as soon as you play that index all the fingers again get into place and they're ready to play don't worry if you're trying to play this exercise and you're like my hand is this is insane this is physically impossible for me to play i'm going to tell you exactly why i've got my notes over here number six is why it's going to be physically impossible for you to do that okay hang around for number six now next up is the seesaw okay the seesaw the seesaw marjorie door i wonder if it's c saw i wonder if it's spelt like that it is today the seesaw we all know what a seesaw does it does this yeah now a lot of us suffer with that when we're playing bass and what this looks like is let's take a major scale again let's take the c major okay and what happens to a lot of bass players is when they put one finger down the other ones jump up i'm going to do this in slow motion [Music] so you can check this out okay so it would look like this c d i'll put this finger down here and all of these other ones jump up okay then i'll play this note all of these will be here i'll play this note here this one would jump up this one and it looks like this i cannot tell you how many people do this it's insane the amount of people that do this okay now the deal is we shouldn't be doing that when our little finger goes down if we're playing this note here the rest of the fingers should not be sticking out here they shouldn't be here they should be on the string they should be on the string check it out [Music] [Music] did you see at any point my fingers sticking out here no here's a little exercise to help with this you can do it across all strings i'm going to just show you how to do on one string and then you can apply it okay so let's start out with the e on the g string okay so play the e and then i want you to have all the fingers engaged kind of like the last exercise over the um over the string ready to play remember if you can't make that stretch it's because of number six we're gonna get there in just a second now i want you to play [Music] so one two one finger one finger two finger one but when you put finger two down do not take finger one off don't do this because that's the seesaw right which go one two one three when you put three down finger three finger two should go down as well finger one should still be down not so we don't want this we want one two one three one four and when we play one to four again all the fingers should be down at this point so it's going to look like this [Music] just like that bit of bond number three is the finger the four finger per fret system for finger perfect system is where we get our finger one two three four we assign them with numbers okay and then we put them across the frets so we assign a finger perfect so if you were playing something like a major scale major scale is our best friend today right okay the fingers don't move they're just over the frets the problem lies where people start using the four finger per fret system for everything the four finger per fret system is a great system for certain types of lines so for instance if i was playing something like [Music] whatever it is okay linear style lines um for instance um i want you back by the jacksons i played before the start of that that um tune great four finger per fret but what happens when it does well now i'm not using a four finger per fret system now i'm using what i call the box system which is where you play one and four for the most part so finger one finger four [Music] and people use this all the time there's very very few pro players if any i don't think i've ever seen a pro player anywhere that uses that four finger perfect system for everything and also when you're playing pentatonic runs like [Music] want to be using that one and three that box system not the four four finger per thread system okay so next up is crap muting crap muting we want to hear the notes that we're playing we don't want to hear any kind of like sympathetic drones or weirdness underneath that's what happens when people have got crap muting first thing to be aware of is that it's worse on five string it's a little harder to control that low b string so be aware of that next is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all mutant system there's various muting systems the and you can mute with your plucking hand and your threat in hand one would be the floating thumb where as you play let's play you got it c major scale as we play my thumb is going to move across the strings it's floating the next one is what i call the movable anchor which is what i use which is where i do have my thumb anchored on something so but it's movable i'm not doing this thing where i'm doing this where it's just like on the top of the pickup or on the e string and i'm just bending over and playing i'm not doing that i'm playing this and as you can see my finger is moving along from this string to that string i'm anchoring it on there and then the third one that's a really popular one is like what i i kind of think as the jacko method what jaco pastorius used to use where he used the pinky and the ring finger of his right hand and they dampened the lower strings as he played lines like this and then obviously he just moved them out of the way when he came down the base now with the left hand or the fretting anode discriminate about all you let all you lefties out there the threat in hand there's a few different mutant methods one of them will happen kind of naturally okay so as we're playing the underneath this part of the hand here is muting [Music] but these strings down here are muted by this part of the hand okay now the other thing that happens is really easy to miss as well is that the second and third finger and a lot of bass players do this unknowingly okay second and third finger of their fretting hand mutes the strings oh these lower strings here check this out [Music] now next up is lack of dynamic range okay when i'm talking about dynamic range i might i mean like within an actual line so if i take a pentatonic line such as um something like that and i could incorporate it within that groove that i was just playing before [Music] i'm trying to play it with no dynamics there but what happens is we really want to throw dynamics in there if i just talk to you like this all the time and i didn't really use any peaks and troughs or hills and valleys within my voice you'd get bored really quickly same thing when we're playing bass we want to be able to bring certain notes out we want to keep certain notes back we want to can heal up but okay that happens because i've got good dynamic range within it's all down to the plucking hand and to get this into your play and you want to take exercises such as take a single note okay let's take the e for instance and i want you to play one two three four i wanna make sure that you can accent just on the one okay one two three four one two three four now i want you to accent on the two so you're gonna be accident with the middle finger now one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four three four one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four these are what i call finger independence exercises which means when you get to play lines if you listen to a drum playing a snare drum he doesn't go now next up is the inverted wrist so on our fretting hand inverted wrist now if we've got an inverted wrist which means our wrist is up like this okay it's inverted it's not round it's pushed up like this it doesn't it takes away the ability to have any kind of like stretch at all within our fretting hand so if you've been really frustrated and looking at other planes how do they stretch like that and i can't if you open your hand like this in front of you okay yeah you open your hand in front of you can you do this to a reasonable degree okay now what i want you to do is put your hand in front of you push your wrist right up right up so it's a right angle now now try and open your fingers it's like it's way harder you straighten that wrist out it becomes way easier so as you push it up like this the wrist you just it is physically impossible for me to open my fingers you've got the inverted wrist going on so drop that wrist down also very important have a little bit of air in here you don't want this part of the thing the hand always in contact with the fingerboard the underside of the fingerboard here now number seven okay not using not using hammer ons and pull offs not using hammer-ons and pull-offs is gonna just hold back your playing and the lines that you want to play so much it is so easy to miss how many great players use them all the time okay if you like that line that i was playing earlier [Music] i'm even i'm using there i'm like pulling off i'm using slides i should have put slides in there as well and then when i played that film i'm not picking every single note so if you do not know a hammer on is where you play one note and you hammer on the other note and a pull-off is where you play one note and you pull it off it's not a lift off it's a pull off you need both of them to be the same volume so if you hear you know like anything like that is gonna be full of hammer-ons and pull-offs so that is it for today guys but don't go anywhere i've got something cool for you um but before i tell you about that and it's free leave a comment let me know which one of these do you think you guys suffer with most and maybe you'll suffer with more than one let me know in the comments you can put the numbers or the names whatever you want but i would absolutely love to hear from you guys and it gives me a way of trying to figure out who's suffering with what the most so it's really really fantastic information for me as well the free thing that i mentioned is the scots bass lessons toolkit it's like a full free resource full of videos about how to get a great bass tone what strings i use i would get a luthier and talk to him about is a master luthier the guy chris may behind over water bases what you should be thinking about when buying a base body woods fretboard woods i talk about amp eq how to use the modes effectively on the fingerboard and everything in between it's totally free and to get all of that hit that link below it'll say toolkit and it'll take you over and then you can get access to it through there now obviously if you're not subscribed to the channel do that you can do that down below and turn your notificatio notifications on other than that take it easy and i'll see you in shed

Channel: Scott's Bass Lessons

Views: 894,905

Keywords: scott devine, bass lessons, bass guitar, soloing, funk, cover, groove, jazz, slap, tuition, masterclass, beginner, beginners, clinic

Id: _5HdRZQu4Pw

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 22 2018