How hard do you slap?

[millerfreak]

Thanks guys. I think what's important is to "phrase" every note that you play.. Accent. That's just as much information that I could give. Gotta have abit of attitude too

 

[Mrdak]

Don't know if this one is hard, but I do have to get abit of power doing it.

Nice job man.... I'd say that's just about hard enough.

 

[HeadyVan Halen]

I like slapping hard. But due to my relatively low action (2 mm), I often get fret buzz. I never get fret buzz when fingerpicking, though.

So, I wonder if I should slap lightly and get the desired tone. I'm curious as to how hard other bassists slap.

I can already tell you probably thump at 1,000 BPM right? Thump it slow and you have to play lighter or it won't be smooth..

And raise that action....Stop Cheatin'..

 

[nutdog]

Don't know if this one is hard, but I do have to get abit of power doing it.

Just subscribed to your channel. Great stuff!

 

[zenrad]

Slapping hard does nothing but tear up your bass. Learn to slap just hard enough to get a note out. It's all about your technique; not how hard you hit the string.

Tell that to Louis Johnson.

 

[Chris K]

But not very exciting, IMHO...

 

[Chrisk-K]

To the OP: If you are trying to be a 'slap machine gun guy' I can't help there, but if you are just trying to include basic slap style as part of your music vocabulary to use when appropriate, the best way to practice is to do simple scales up and down the neck, first fingerstyle, then thumb hits. When you can get both techniques to have the same open string muting (i.e., no ringing of open strings) and basic tone, with the same low end and volume (i.e., the primary difference just being the front end percussive attack), then you are ready to go for 90% of slap situations and you are ready to work on getting your slap versus pop volume and tone even!

This is great advice. Machine gun slap does nothing for me. I'd like to use "slap" as an occasional different flavor.

 

[JimmyM]

Thanks guys. I think what's important is to "phrase" every note that you play.. Accent. That's just as much information that I could give. Gotta have abit of attitude too

you rock, sir.

 

[BillW87]

Slapping, like drumming, is to make an object vibrate and ring by striking it. The longer you touch it, the more you will damp the vibration. So the question is not just how hard, but also how long, and we're talking milliseconds here.

Try to think of it as a movement away from the string. It will help.

+1000
How hard you slap ultimately has very little to do with how clearly the note rings out, and can often be counter-productive. The first thing I teach to people learning how to slap is that its not how hard your thumb strikes the string that counts, but how quickly you get it back off the string again. If your thumb spends any extra time on the string at all it deadens the note and gives you a ghost-note feel instead of a fat slap tone.

Once you develop that quick release you can adjust the dynamics of your slap technique by playing softer or harder. There are way too many slap players that I see slamming the heck out of their basses at gigs just to get the notes to ring out because they don't have a clean follow-through to their slap. Slapping is like cracking a whip, you can swing it as hard as you damn please without getting a crack until you get the tip of the whip to change direction as quickly as possible.

 

[millerfreak]

Guys, can I say.. there's no proper way to slap.. If you like what you do, do it. There's no need to disagree of what people do if they like it.

And most of the time it's not about knowing how to do it, but listening to it OVER and OVER again until you get the feel.. You should relate every technique that you do to the MUSIC itself.. Study the technique, experiment, until you don't even have to think about it when you're using it.

 

[zenrad]

+1000
How hard you slap ultimately has very little to do with how clearly the note rings out, and can often be counter-productive. The first thing I teach to people learning how to slap is that its not how hard your thumb strikes the string that counts, but how quickly you get it back off the string again. If your thumb spends any extra time on the string at all it deadens the note and gives you a ghost-note feel instead of a fat slap tone.

Once you develop that quick release you can adjust the dynamics of your slap technique by playing softer or harder. There are way too many slap players that I see slamming the heck out of their basses at gigs just to get the notes to ring out because they don't have a clean follow-through to their slap. Slapping is like cracking a whip, you can swing it as hard as you damn please without getting a crack until you get the tip of the whip to change direction as quickly as possible.

Nope - Larry Graham doesn't do the "cracking the whip" thing
skip to the 1:00 mark


He shoves his thumb into the strings and sort of leaves it there.
At 2:15 he does the line from "Everyday People" and you get another good look at it.

Guys, can I say.. there's no proper way to slap.. If you like what you do, do it. There's no need to disagree of what people do if they like it.

And most of the time it's not about knowing how to do it, but listening to it OVER and OVER again until you get the feel.. You should relate every technique that you do to the MUSIC itself.. Study the technique, experiment, until you don't even have to think about it when you're using it.

+1

There are a lot of ways to do this, you can lay your thumb into it, bounce it off the string, slap lightly, snap hard or soft, slap over the frets or closer to the pickups. I've seen great slappers who point their thumbs upward, some who point it downward some who keep it level with the strings.

Slapping is like playing hand drums with notes. It's an organic thing and while there are some basic guidelines there is no one right way to do it.

 

[Chris K]

Nope - Larry Graham doesn't do the "cracking the whip" thing
skip to the 1:00 mark


He shoves his thumb into the strings and sort of leaves it there.
At 2:15 he does the line from "Everyday People" and you get another good look at it.

"He shoves his thumb into the strings and sort of leaves it there."

Take another good look.

 

[BillW87]

Nope - Larry Graham doesn't do the "cracking the whip" thing
skip to the 1:00 mark


He shoves his thumb into the strings and sort of leaves it there.
At 2:15 he does the line from "Everyday People" and you get another good look at it.

-1
He's planting his thumb on the string *below* the string that he's slapping after he follows through, not leaving it on the string that he's slapping. Besides, in that clip he's playing a double thumb technique, not a standard slap and pop technique which is a very different ball game. The reason he plants his thumb on the string below the ringing one for that technique is so that he can bring his thumb back up afterward to strike the string on the upstroke as is done in double thumbing. If he was shoving his thumb into the string and just leaving it there you wouldn't hear anything more than a dead note, because a string most definitely can't ring if you're muting it.

 

[millsbass5]

I tend to be a pretty damn aggressive slapper. Thing is,I don't wanna be (At least all the time.)!
I started a thread just like this (some months back),and then someone posted this video.It changed my whole outlook (and approach,too) when using this technique. Although,face it. Sometimes music just needs a full-on,balls-out approach. A little thing called DYNAMICS,kids. VERY IMPORTANT.......

Have a look see:

 

[zenrad]

-1
He's planting his thumb on the string *below* the string that he's slapping after he follows through, not leaving it on the string that he's slapping. Besides, in that clip he's playing a double thumb technique, not a standard slap and pop technique which is a very different ball game. The reason he plants his thumb on the string below the ringing one for that technique is so that he can bring his thumb back up afterward to strike the string on the upstroke as is done in double thumbing. If he was shoving his thumb into the string and just leaving it there you wouldn't hear anything more than a dead note, because a string most definitely can't ring if you're muting it.

Um...duh.

I didn't think I had to spell it out like that, I figured anyone who has ever touched a stinged instrument would realize that if you put a right hand finger on a string and left it there it would mute the string.

Yes, it rests on the string BELOW. He doesn't "crack the whip" and let it bounce right back, which was my point. You had said that was the way it needs to be done, and it's not the case. Some of us have been slapping for a long time, over 20 years in my case, and I've seen very many different approaches.

 

[BillW87]

Um...duh.

I didn't think I had to spell it out like that, I figured anyone who has ever touched a stinged instrument would realize that if you put a right hand finger on a string and left it there it would mute the string.

Yes, it rests on the string BELOW. He doesn't "crack the whip" and let it bounce right back, which was my point. You had said that was the way it needs to be done, and it's not the case. Some of us have been slapping for a long time, over 20 years in my case, and I've seen very many different approaches.

Clearly a couple mis-communications here. I'm sorry for assuming you were being dumb, because unfortunately on the internet there is an overabundance of people who fall into that category so I jumped to that incorrect conclusion. Apologies there. In response however, I think my comment was also misinterpreted as well as suggesting that the traditional slap and pop technique is the only way to play slap bass. What I was trying to convey is that when I'm teaching the average player looking to learn traditional slap bass that's how I teach it because its the simplest, and in my experience, most straightforward way to approach the technique. Yes, if people want to learn some Graham-style double thumbing that's definitely one of the zillions of effective ways to slap a bass and if it came off that I was suggesting otherwise I apologize for that too.

When I try to give advice on playing I follow the KISS rule (keep it simple, stupid) where the most straightforward technique wins out, but there's always dozens of other ways to get the job done and many of them are more effective, just usually harder to explain to someone looking for a quick answer to their problem. If a player is slapping hard enough that they're hurting their tone, their instruments, or themselves "cracking the whip" is a quick and easy fix to the problem, but certainly not the only one.

-edit-
Also, after all that, Graham's technique doesn't defeat the principle of what I was originally saying: how fast you get off the string determines how clearly the note rings out. He follows through quickly parallel to the body to the next string down to get the note to ring out clearly instead of moving his thumb in the whipping motion away from the body like many modern players, but the physics of it is the same. The less time your finger/thumb spends in contact with the string the less of the fundamental frequency of the note you're going to dampen, resulting in a truer tone to the note. Contact with the string kills lower-order harmonics the fastest, deadening the most powerful part of your tone and meaning that you have to hit the string that much harder to get the same "oomph" to your slap.

 

[millerfreak]

Guys.

I believe there's no such thing as "hurting your tone" - Marcus does this alot of time, and I don't think it's hurting his tone. I think of dynamics. I think of.. stressing the notes. I think of accent. I think of "talking".

Louis Johnson slaps very hard in his video, is that hurting his tone? No. It sounds harsh, and it has character in it.

To the OP, if all these talks confuse you, I suggest learning the basics, and experiment with it. Thats what I do most of the time.