Reflections on a Year in Bass
I’m coming up on a year playing bass for the Super Devils, a rockabilly outfit located in South Jersey. While my last post expressed significant ennui and dissatisfaction with the fact that life’s been in a holding pattern, my bass playing is probably the one area where i’ve made a LOT of progress, and very quick progress at that.
Frankly, after a few weeks of playing with those guys, i wasn’t sure i’d make it. that’s because my hand/wrist technique for slap was predicated thoroughly on adding accent to bluegrass songs. or to put it in layman’s terms, most bluegrass slapping is about accentuating the end of a line or a transition to a solo or chorus. You can hear what i mean in this clip of the Bluegrass Brothers:
The slap is on the upbeat, and it’s not sustained very long: just a few bappita-bappitas and you’re back to plucking.
With rockabilly, you’re slapping the whole time, so that slightly stiff hand posture I’ve used in bluegrass to good effect just hasn’t fit the bill. In fact, if it wasn’t for an impromptu lesson from another slap bass player, I probably would have said “the Hell with it” and moved on.
But I stuck with the new technique, and now i can do things on my bass i never thought possible. Stuff like this guy does:
