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How do you ( if you you do it ) study a bassist?

#21
I play the style or artist I am interested in at the time. If you like it you'll play.

I was working on James Jamerson. Then, thanks to the transcription thread, I started working on Rush. Last night I went back to Jamerson stuff and it was much easier to play. Easier in the respect that the areas I had issues with were no issue, now.

I do read music and cold reads on bass are getting better. Between that, just playing and upping the difficulty I think it's paying off.

Reading, and not tab, really does help and make things much easier.
 
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#23
When I study a bassist I do transcriptions, chord changes, and usually have the melody line there as well. I don’t do one song, I’ll do several and see what they’re doing for the changes and look at similarities or differences with changes.

My favorite to do this with is Ray Brown and Oscar Pettiford. It’s a great way to find “portable” licks that they use in different situations. It’s allowed me to develop some general guidelines of how I can construct my own lines that sound like me.
 
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#32
I just used to play their songs and learn their common little things that they did and try to incorporate them into what I did.

When I first got into bass, I got into Steve Harris, so I learned a lot of Iron Maiden stuff. Due to that, I kind of started to learn (just from playing a lot of his songs) what types of fills he'd use, what lines might be his gotos, etc. You learn to kind of think "if X played on Y, it'd sound like Z", if that makes sense. I never did "transcription", per se, but I learned his lines by ear (and as a consequence, memorized them), which is similar. Due to this, a lot of improvisational stuff I did back then in a different context - fills, etc - came from Steve's stuff, specifically the 1-4-5-1 pentatonic fill he does a lot.

One thing I specifically never did was go down the gear path. I never knew what basses Steve played or what gear he used, and I never really cared. (For a very long time, I didn't know that he used flats.) I also didn't care about him as a person or an idol - I knew nothing about his life, his history, etc - and that was never my focus. (A friend of mine who was learning guitar at the same time, on the other hand, knew everything about band members and band histories of the bands he was into. I didn't and still don't care about that hero worship stuff.) What I cared about was the music - the note choices, the signature stuff (his gallop), his fills, etc. I wanted to learn that stuff to get better.

I guess that if and when I really study a bassist, it's really more about listening to their body of work and trying to play it. These days, if I'm interested, I'll also watch videos by the bassist where he or she talks about their approach (like Adam Neely talking about chording on bass, or Victor Wooten talking about double-thumping, etc).

I haven't really done this in a long time, though. If anything, I'm more likely to study musicians who aren't bassists. I'd love to study Steve Gadd and John Bonham at the moment, and I wouldn't mind studying some lines from other instruments like trumpet.
 
#33
I look up what equipment they use, whatever free tabs are available, and then I will do a google search for the following: "bassist name" + playing + "name of the song" + youtube. The last one works amazingly well. I've been able to find footage of the bassist playing the song live, which helped me pick out difficult passages for songs I've been wanting to learn that contradicted the tabs. It also helped me to emulate the plucking or techniques they used for that specific song - it's hard to hear that just from listening to the track.

Carlos D. of Interpol, Al Cisneros of Om, and John Taylor of Duran Duran are some of the people I've learned from in this way.

Even for seemingly simpler songs, I've found that there is usually something important to be learned by watching the person who wrote and originally performed the bass part.
 
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#34
I've been playing bass since the 60's and thought I had learnt all I was going to learn. I was bored, and decided to sign up for some lessons. I found an excellent bassist near me, told him I wasn't expecting him to get me out of my rut, but maybe he could make it a bit wider!

He did just what I asked. He expanded my playing vocabulary, showed me how to play the old stuff in different ways, which opened the door to playing a lot of new stuff. He made me a more flexible and confident player.

Sometimes you just need a fresh pair of eyes.
 
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#35
gre
LBS-bass said:
Generally I will deconstruct their work by sitting down with some of the songs they've played and learning each section note for note. I will add here that I'm generally not a purist for N4N on stage but this is something I do for players whose work I revere because I feel like knowing what they did and figuring out how they did it makes me a better player. Chuck Rainey and John Paul Jones are both significant players for me, so I study their work in this way. I deconstructed the entire Aja album one year as an exercise and learned to play every song on there as close as possible to the original version.

One thing I learn when I do this is what my technical limitations are and, in pondering those, whether it's important enough for me to spend tons of time figuring out how to overcome those and, if so, what the learning process is for doing that. Rainey plays a lot of ghost notes, and I found out pretty quickly that I'd waste tons of time if I tried to incorporate all of that in as I went along. So learning his lines helped me refine my way of learning, in general. I learned the meat and potatoes of that stuff first, then I would go back and pick up some the smaller nuances, but maybe not all of them. This way of learning has served me very well in getting things stage-ready.

John Paul Jones presents a different set of limitations because he never plays the same thing twice and, on a technical level, he can be wicked fast. I can't play as fast as he can; just can't do it with the ever-present swelling in my joints, so I have had to learn that there are some places where I have to invent good compromises and other places where I just have to concede that it's above my pay grade. It's taught me to be inventive about overcoming some of my limits.

But, overall, what happens is that I add phrases and various things to my player's toolbox that I might not have thought of on my own.
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great advise thanks!
 
#36
Hasty said:
When I study a bassist I do transcriptions, chord changes, and usually have the melody line there as well. I don’t do one song, I’ll do several and see what they’re doing for the changes and look at similarities or differences with changes.

My favorite to do this with is Ray Brown and Oscar Pettiford. It’s a great way to find “portable” licks that they use in different situations. It’s allowed me to develop some general guidelines of how I can construct my own lines that sound like me.
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[/thread]

Listening and learning is great, but there is no better way to STUDY a bass player than actually transcribing their lines and seeing how they fit into the chord progression; melody is a great idea too. Of course, that’s work which is why so few actually do it. It’s the difference between reading about a science experiment and performing it.
 
#37
A bunch of great advice in this thread. My two cents would be listen with headphones without your hands on a bass. Imho it helps to get in the zone by understanding their tone. For instance, figuring out James Jamerson by playing a Rick might make things more difficult. If you are able to find any isolated bass tracks of who you are studying would also be a big help.
 

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