In jazz bass playing, a very important factor
is your sound.
In fact, probably in any instrumentalist's
personality as a musician, it's the way they
sound, it's the quality of tone that makes
them identifiable.
And so it's really important to have a good
concept of sound.
In jazz bass playing, we tend to play toward
the bottom of the fingerboard.
A lot of times in orchestral playing, we play
here, which is a beautiful sound, but it's
a little more delicate, a little more round.
Here, we want to get the hand down to the
bottom of the fingerboard.
Right, so, we have a really good sense of
activating the harmonic series.
If you know anything about harmonics, you
know that the string itself provides a fundamental
tone, like this.
If I divide here at the octave, I get the
first partial, and here again the fifth, the octave
and so forth.
And the more we play toward the end of the
string, the more the tone has a deeper, more
robust sound.
So, if I play here in the middle, I'm not
activating as much of the harmonic framework
in my sound.
But if I play more toward the end, I'm going
to get a brighter, stronger, more penetrating
sound in the rhythm section, which is really
important.
We'll talk later on about using an amplifier,
but for me, the most important thing about
sound is developing an acoustic sound.
So one of the things I have my students do
is simply just play open strings.
And as I said earlier when we talked about
the history of the bass, I also really want
to work hard at activating the percussion
part of the sound.
The fingerboard sound as well.
I want to approach the sound so that when
I pluck, I don't just simply release the finger
of the string from here.
But I come to the bass with the string at
a point of motion, like this.
So whether I play soft,
or loud, I always
want to have a good sound.
So work on your sound, also I would encourage
you, even though this is a jazz bass discussion,
to use the bow, and just play long notes on
the bass.
It's amazing what you can do when you play
long, slow notes.
One thing that I like to do too is that I
like to put the bow as close to the bridge
as possible, and really draw the sound out
of the instrument.
So even though we're talking about jazz bass,
the bow, whether it's French or German, is
a very, very important part of making a good
sound.
So work on your sound.
When you have a good sound, you have a good
time.
When you have a good time, you have a good
sound, you have good intonation, it's all
connected.
Alright, thank you.
