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Does Slap equal Funk?
- Thread starter Helix
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Who told you that? I laugh at that. The funk is in the "feel" and syncopation.
Anyone who says you must have slap to have funk can be safely ignored.
That's like asking if running air over your vocal chords equals singing. In many cases it just equals an annoying noise.
E="bassliner50, post: 17463903, member: 217065"]Who told you that? I laugh at that. The funk is in the "feel" and syncopation.[/QUOTE]
Actually I hear it all the time. But I do the same thing, just kinda kinda laugh at the comment......but it did finally make me ask the question to TB'ers to get more of a professional opinion
Actually I hear it all the time. But I do the same thing, just kinda kinda laugh at the comment......but it did finally make me ask the question to TB'ers to get more of a professional opinion
This young man is not slap but definitely funk. I was first attracted to his strong groove on funk tunes like below.. He has some pretty decent chops too...
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I don't associate slapping with any particular genre. Mudvayne has slap bass and they weren't funk. You can hear slapping in Periphery. Imo one of the more tasteful users of the technique is the bassist for Tesseract. There's also a ton of bass players who play funk that never slap.
Parliament has little (if any?) slap. Parliament was funk. Even Bootsy’s later stuff, not much of a slapper. Hell, he is using distortion on the bass and still funky.
I have a band that originally set out to try to be a modern funk act. It didn’t quite work out and has become a very eclectic mix of metal, punk, funk, industrial, jazz and hip hop. Kind of like Mr. Bungle’s “Squeeze Me Macaroni” or “Mr. Nice Guy”. I strongly avoid calling us funk and clarify that some parts get funk-ey, but we aren’t funk.
I have a band that originally set out to try to be a modern funk act. It didn’t quite work out and has become a very eclectic mix of metal, punk, funk, industrial, jazz and hip hop. Kind of like Mr. Bungle’s “Squeeze Me Macaroni” or “Mr. Nice Guy”. I strongly avoid calling us funk and clarify that some parts get funk-ey, but we aren’t funk.
I agree with many of the posts that funk is more about feel & groove and less about technique. James Brown's heyday from roughly 1964 through 1972 when he and his band more or less wrote the book on the funk genre bears this out … no slap bass, but funky on the highest order. On a related note, I think that it is the job of the entire band to be funky and not just the bass player. JB and his band demonstrate this concept dramatically. He had a large ensemble, but a lot of the individual parts were simple and counterpoint to each other and it was funky as much for what was not played as for what was played.
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Just curious... did you hear this from a guitar player? I'm certain you wouldn't have heard it from a drummer.
No….I hear it from the audience in general.
I think the perception from people that don’t play is, when they see a bassist thump and pop especially with the conception into the main stream music with Sly and the Family Stone and newer songs like Uptown Funk, they automatically (stereotype if you will) as it being Funk or trying to add Funk…..it’s a technique, not a genre
But, you are correct. I have never heard that from any of the drummers I have played with
As a huge primus fan, they are far from funk, as spanndrew is probably trying to point out. Les slaps all the time, but it's not funk.its funky, that dosent make it funk.
