Using drum music on bass

[jeromebass]

I have been using a drum book to practice different rhythm patterns on bass. I'll play the top note with my middle finger and the bottom one with my index. I have been just focusing on the rhythms so I play a fifth the whole time. I have also been using the top rythm as a pluck and the bottom rythm as a note change. It's pretty sweet getting different lines than I would have played otherwise. Do you guys have any other suggestions on using drum patterns applied to the bass?

[lunarpollen]

I think that's a great idea!!!

[neptoon]

i would suggest checking out the american and swiss army rudiments...these were developed for a lot of different reasons, but with a snare drum, when you get these down, they make for very different rhythms, even in a straight 16th note pattern...depending on how they're played, they provide for economy of motion, and you'll find that playing rhythmic patterns alternating thumb and plucking (instead of right/left hand) in a slap style you can come up with some pretty cool stuff...rudiments are about as 'roots' percussion as it gets, but as you'll find, some of those 'rudiments' are hrdaly 'rudimentary' ...pretty interesting

[neptoon]

in addition, some rudiments, like say, a 'paradiddle-diddle' (that's really what it's called ), would be played in 16th notes R-L-R-R-L-L, or on bass you could do thumb-pluck-thumb-thumb-pluck-pluck (double thumb followed by a double pluck on your second and third finger)...as a variation, instead of using your thumb to double slap (or double thumb wooten-style), you could use your fingers to slap against the fretboard...there are a zillion ways to do this, but it's pretty cool...i learned percussion formally and i'm self-taught, pretty much on bass, so when i started on bass, it was from a percussion mindset

[jeromebass]

I wish I had some formal percussion training. I dont know the "basic" snare patterns one would learn in a "high school nad" type of setting. What's the pattern that goes like... 1 2 2 1 2 1 1 2 ? I use that one alot since I first learned it. I thought that was the paradiddle.

[rustinstrings]

long time ago, when I was still trying my luck with slapping, a drummer friend got me interested on the paradiddle thing.
After spending few hours doing Single Paradiddle RLRR LRLL (as described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flam),
replacing "R" with right hand slap of ghost note (left hand mute), and "L" with left hand slap (different sound of ghost note), once I got it up to speed, It sounded really flashy and somewhat impressive in the right context.

[MarkTAW]

Vic Firth has a great website devoted to drum rudiments complete with video demonstrations.

[MarkTAW]

http://www.vicfirth.com/education/rudiments.html

[jeromebass]

One of the rudiments is called The Inverted Flam Tap. It sounds like a date i went on in high school. lol

[neptoon]

inverted flam taps are about as unnatural motion as there is in the rudiment world...it's a really odd rudiment...it might be cool to play rudiments on bass and incorporate flams as double stops

per the above comment...that's pretty funny

[nsmar4211]

I use my drum set books for bass lines just by stealing the rhythms....sometimes I'll run through a scale using that rhythm, sometimes I'll play only the notes out of the scale that the rhythm is (8 8th notes in measure, 8 notes in scale, skip the notes that are on the rests). By rhythm I mean the snare and bass parts mostly....don't need constant 8th notes running and that's a lot of what ride cymbals do!

Set books are great for latin beats and such . Never thought of doing the drum rudiments on bass......hrm.......and there's more than 25 if you start throwing the screwey ones in LOL. Cheese Chas anyone? I can see doing swiss army triplets using double stops on the 1 and 5 for the flam parts....... *heads off to woodshed*

[sitarmania]

I've thought about it a lot and as a self-taught drummer and then bassist, it's really interesting to hear other people talking about this. I'm still learning both instruments and I always will be, however learning the bass as a drummer is interesting particularly because it gives me more of an insight into drumming than the actual bass itself. Different genres' grooves are sometimes made by one or the other, so depending on what style of music I'm attempting to grasp, I sometimes have a unique approach to trying to fit a bass line over the drums.

I was just reading another thread where the rhythm of bass in relation to the kick drum was being discussed. This made me think about how different styles of music depend so heavily on the rhythm established by one instrument, say a lame-tastic power chord riff. To me, songwriting is about having unique voices coming from all the instruments, working around each other, not just banging on the 1 and 3 of 4/4

Having said this, I'd like to offer a little different advice. Try and pick out songs where the bass and drum rhythms compliment each other without just sounding the same. Right now the first thing that comes to mind is the legendary "Take Five". The main bass riff is 2 notes played on 4,5,1

(however bad an example this may be, being in 5/4)

So simple, and yet so effective when placed over that groove on the drums.

sorry if this has been a pointless rant, but to me this song really shows my point, and I hope it in some way helps.

[monsterthompson]

I don't often haunt this part of the TB forums, but I showed up today because I've been working on right hand non-slap technique using the book Stick Control for snare drums. This old thread popped up when I ran a search on the subject, so I'm posting my $0.02 here.

I'm working my way through the rudiments and paradiddles, using my index finger as the the left stick and my middle finger as the right stick and droning on an open string, even working up to string skipping up and down while running the same right hand pattern. It seems to be helping, so I'm going to charge ahead with it. I'm pleased to see that this idea has worked for others in the past.