Right hand thumb damping technique

[AdamF]

Hi

When I pluck, I play with three fingers on my right hand, and I control the bass with the heel of my right hand so that I do not need to rest my thumb on a string to maintain control. My fungers are long enough that I do not need to move my wrist much to pluck across the strings. So when I play the E the thumn is sometimes over the string, but usually does not play it.

I found with some songs where I had to maintain a sort of strum-ish rhythm where damping was part of the rhythm - Jingo was an example - I found myself playing the rhythm by including a damping of the E string (I only use 4 string basses) with my thumb whilst plucking with the fingers. This seemed to in theory be extendable to other strings (not that I really needed to with that song) by using the top joint of the thumb (where tit sticks out) to get accuracy (rather like slap technique). The fact that set-up I have puts the strings in a slight bow influences this, I think positively. None of the strings were being played open.

Anybody else worked with this technique? I use it very rarely but I found it interesting and a useful arrow to the quiver.

Adam