Anyone else find it hard to strictly alternate?

[Tupac]

If any one of you played drums or marching snare, you'd know that different hands assign themselves to eight notes or what's in between. For example, drum with your hands, "1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4". Now take away your left hand. Your right should be playing straight eight notes naturally. Now, I find myself doing this on the bass with finger plucking. Of course, not to that extent, but it happens every now and then. As for the patterns that involve plucking twice on one string and once below, I either rake or say forget about and double up.

[RBrownBass]

Originally Posted by Tupac

If any one of you played drums or marching snare, you'd know that different hands assign themselves to eight notes or what's in between. For example, drum with your hands, "1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4". Now take away your left hand. Your right should be playing straight eight notes naturally. Now, I find myself doing this on the bass with finger plucking. Of course, not to that extent, but it happens every now and then. As for the patterns that involve plucking twice on one string and once below, I either rake or say forget about and double up.

I did play marching snare (and timpani during symphonic season, which began after the last playoff football game). Haven't played seriously in years, but I'm still a better snare drummer than a bassist by a silly margin. I'm the other way around in that it helped me to alternate fingers. In passages where I'm going from one string to the next, yeah, I'm sure I double a finger sometimes.

[Russell L]

I always remind myself of the logic of using my fingers wisely, keeping up with which one accents the beat, which is dominant, etc., but then, when in use, I find that I don't actually always do it that way. Somehow, it just works out like that. I was noticing it the other night. When I should've been using my second finger on the beat, sometimes it ended up being my first. You'd think I might not have an even accent like that, but I did. I was pleasantly surprised that it seemed to cause no trouble. I still think I should consider trying to do it more logically, though.

[KingRazor]

Depends completely on the part that I'm playing. If triplets are involved, I will often break from the alternating a bit.

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by Tupac

If any one of you played drums or marching snare, you'd know that different hands assign themselves to eight notes or what's in between. For example, drum with your hands, "1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4". Now take away your left hand. Your right should be playing straight eight notes naturally. Now, I find myself doing this on the bass with finger plucking. Of course, not to that extent, but it happens every now and then. As for the patterns that involve plucking twice on one string and once below, I either rake or say forget about and double up.

Interesting view point, but because it is our brains that assign the actions that is where the learning should start.
Accents come from what we have learned so 1 2 3 and 4 is the same as
Black Blue Purple Green because the syllables used represent that count, but we are not assigning numbers so we are not ever alway trying to find the "Black"

Fact is we have dominant habits and if we can use them so be it. I view any techniques in playing as flowing. So if the flow stops then you can start again.
So if a song you are playing stops,has a short rest or change..whatever that interrupts the flow, then you can "re-set" and start again.
But to take such a thing further, if we are thinking about our fingers or technique then we are not concentrating on the task of playing, so these things will appear or become issues in our playing, because after all our actions are by what we think, our reactions are by what we have learned.

[Clef_de_fa]

I worked on my alternation when I started playing bass ... I had a teacher for 8 years ( 3 of them at college with one on the classical DB and the other on EB ).

What I did is, practice arpeggios accross all the strings of your bass, alternating on your way up and when you come back, change the starting finger.

at one point alternating and the finger who start the phrase won't matter.

[Slammyapple]

Just posted something along these lines in exercise sticky...

Excercise sticky

Agree, after a while it doesn't matter so much... but it takes a long time to get there.