"Pop" sound on bass
 

http://youtu.be/N3ilXR-leBs

Above is Mr. Manring's performance of Excuse Me Mr. Manring, which I have been working on a rendition of. In the first "verse", the first part he plays before he gets to the recurring bit at 1:07, he does something several times that I can only describe as a "pop". Not a pop as the counterpart to a slap, although he does a fair amount of that, but actually a pop sound, like a woodblock. Does anyone have any idea how he does this? My first, and still strongest thought is that it somehow utilizes piezo pickups in the body, but there are several reasons I'm not so sure about that. For one, he's talked about how it's often impractical to set up the piezo pickups in the body of the instrument for a live performance setting, and it's better suited to actually recording. I'm also not sure if he also has the piezo pickups in the body of his custom Sonus, like he does on the Hyperbass. And then there's the actual visual of what he's doing; he seems to only be interacting with the strings, unless he's somehow flicking the body there.

It seems, barring the piezo pickup theory, that he's doing something with a string pop to make that noise, but that always seems to come out much more "clacky" than "poppy". It's not something I need to know to play the song, but I'm very curious about how he makes that sound.

I'm not hopeful that anyone will know, but it's worth a shot.

I think what he's doing is muting one of the highest strings with his right hand and plucking it with his nail or just popping it close to the bridge. I've tried something similar when messing around with percussive loops and gotten a similar result. Seems like it would be challenging to do it as much as Michael does though, especially in between other intricate playing!

Michael Manring has forum here in the Ask a Pro! section. I'd be willing to bet he'd know.

http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f42/