Double Bass Intonation

[Bruce Calin]

As a player of both fretless and fretted bass guitar, playing with equal tempered instruments, I've become annoyingly aware of clashes - my fretted bass, even when tuned accurately (with an equal-tempered electronic tuner) can have a few notes that just don't sound as sweet as my fretless can (when I manage to play it accurately ).

Major thirds are the worst offenders - an equal tempered major third is almost 14 cents sharp of a 5/4 ratio major third. If I'm playing an open D string and F# at the 11th fret of the G string, I've learned I need to "push" the fretted string towards the bridge to flatten it. My tuner says that equal-tempered F# is exactly right, but my ear disagrees.

I've been following the discussion in this thread with interest. I've developed an ear for what sounds right - some of the comments here help me understand why it sounds right.

The late Paul Ramsier wrote a book of solo pieces for young bass players. Most have separate accompaniments that can be played on piano or bass. One of the pieces has major thirds all over the place. It's great to play the two different accompaniments and show how the intonation has to be adjusted. Luckily for me, the piano parts are simple enough that even a piano student from a half century ago can play them.

 

[turf3]

Well, I grew up musically playing an instrument of flexible intonation, the saxophone, and late in life I've taken up an instrument that has no intonation, the double bass. Maybe I've just grown accustomed to flexing a little to make notes sound good and I may not even be aware of what I'm doing. On DB, if it sounds sharp, I pull up toward the nut, and if it sounds flat I push down toward the bridge.

I don't think of myself as an "untutored feral musician" but it seems to me like using those things on the sides of my head gets me where I need to be, even though I understand the mathematics of the various tuning schemas.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that I suck and I've got a tin ear so I can't even tell that I suck. We can't rule out that possiblity...

 

[Huy Nguyen]

@Chris Fitzgerald thanks for this new set of videos. I've decided to really work on my intonation seriously. The videos are helping and I think some of the insights here are cruicial (like using IRealB/FeelBook to do iiVI sequences to practice intonation instead of drones). I'm also really getting into the Tonal Energy App and leaving it on at all times. Jason Heath has some interesting videos on using it. I've bought the Lauren Pierce book on "Please Play In Tune". I just noticed another Jason video last night and also looked into some of what the teachers on ToneBase have to say in using open strings.

In the end I think it's all what you've been doing all this time: developing a kinesthetic sense (but I'd rather call it a unconscious competence skill and making intonation something that is embodied). So far in the last week, long tones and slowly going through passages using the bow while watching TEA to correct pitch and develop that sensation for being in well temperment tuning has been the most effective. There is a trust that must be developed as well as a trust to adjust (as you are doing by rolling the finger) to just the right milimeter. This is such a crazy instrument tbh.

The Lauren Pierce stuff is interesting and I'm only a few pages in but I think their approach is to use hand structure and drones to nail the "static" intonation related to being in tune in pythagorean tuning using harmonics, etc. The "my students are never out of tune" approach. I'm wondering if the answer isn't either or, but bc it's so hard, we need it all. Strong sense for perfect pitch but also be able to recover quickly and invisibly.

The other brutal torture device I just discovered is to use the bow while slowing down a jazz solo and use TEA to stay in tune. Quite quite interesting. Right now I'm working on some of LaFaro's and Dexter Gordon's playing on Satin Doll (in two separate recordings). I'm kinda refusing to go to classical materials to do it when really the need to be in tune in jazz settings is a completely different ball of wax than classical.

Classical you can take your sweet time really nailing it to the cent meanwhile in jazz you have to sing the expected intonation before you even play the note i'd argue. I guess it's the same in both arenas but the stakes are different. In some sense you can hide more in jazz with bad intonation but there are times when there's no hiding bc you have to solo when everybody else dropped out or playing in smaller settings (duos/trios).

Really looking forward the 3rd installment. There's def a big difference for me between arco and pizz. Pizz I tend to be in tune more. I think I tend to lean flat with Pizz tho. How long before we see the next episode?

 

[Clyde Stats]

Doing “vomit exercises” with the bow against drones has really improved my intonation immensely! It has also really sharpened my ear for hearing when I’m in tune or out of tune. Unfortunately, it’s also really sharpened my ear for hearing when everybody else is in tune or out of tune. Definitely a double-edged sword!

 

[Chris Fitzgerald]

@Huy Nguyen thanks for the feedback! I’ve never found looking at a tuner to be of any practical use beyond making these videos, but I know others use them as a practice tool. I’ve also had limited success with using hand shape as a guide, but that’s because I have focused on playing with a relaxed hand for the past 20 years. Different strokes, but in the end I think anything that gets the player to focus more on intonation is a good thing.

In the end, drones and metronomes (Droneomes?) are just tools to provide metrics and guardrails to practice to allow us to hone our skills. I’ve seen people use them to great positive benefit, and I’ve also seen (and heard) people who turn them on and seem to be impervious to them, almost like they are hoping that by having them on their playing will magically get better even if they don’t seem to be paying attention to them. This subset of people will play out of time with a metronome, and out of tune with a drone, seemingly not attempting to adjust to them and just doing what they re already doing.

The longer I play and the more I practice, the more convinced I become that attention - focused, undistracted attention - is the most precious resource we have. The best players play, and the best performances happen, in the “zone”, where attention is absolute and the experience is all consuming. If I could wave a magic wand and imbue all of my students with a single gift, it would be the ability to focus their attention when practicing and playing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the brilliant psychologist and author of “Flow” has a great illustration of this as an image:

This is the best illustration of focused attention I can imagine when it comes to practicing to improve skill at pretty much anything.

 

[SteveCS]

@Huy Nguyen thanks for the feedback! I’ve never found looking at a tuner to be of any practical use beyond making these videos, but I know others use them as a practice tool. I’ve also had limited success with using hand shape as a guide, but that’s because I have focused on playing with a relaxed hand for the past 20 years. Different strokes, but in the end I think anything that gets the player to focus more on intonation is a good thing.

In the end, drones and metronomes (Droneomes?) are just tools to provide metrics and guardrails to practice to allow us to hone our skills. I’ve seen people use them to great positive benefit, and I’ve also seen (and heard) people who turn them on and seem to be impervious to them, almost like they are hoping that by having them on their playing will magically get better even if they don’t seem to be paying attention to them. This subset of people will play out of time with a metronome, and out of tune with a drone, seemingly not attempting to adjust to them and just doing what they re already doing.

The longer I play and the more I practice, the more convinced I become that attention - focused, undistracted attention - is the most precious resource we have. The best players play, and the best performances happen, in the “zone”, where attention is absolute and the experience is all consuming. If I could wave a magic wand and imbue all of my students with a single gift, it would be the ability to focus their attention when practicing and playing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the brilliant psychologist and author of “Flow” has a great illustration of this as an image:

View attachment 7425957

This is the best illustration of focused attention I can imagine when it comes to practicing to improve skill at pretty much anything.

It's an obvious model in suggesting the best or most effective engagement (be that playing or in practice) happens when challenge and ability are sufficiently matched (duh!). If we assume that both Anxiety and Boredom both lead to disengagement (they usually do!), is it in the interests of progress to 1) raise the 'Challenge' when in 'Flow', with the risk of creating Anxiety, or 2) keep doing the same stuff until boredom strikes and only then raise the level of 'Challenge' in the hope of moving quickly back into 'Flow' and not falling through the cracks?

 

[bassmanbrent]

If I could wave a magic wand and imbue all of my students with a single gift, it would be the ability to focus their attention when practicing and playing.

Man, I wish somebody hit me over the head with this when I was in my late teens/early twenties. So much time was wasted wiggling my fingers while my brain wandered around aimlessly. It’s such a simple concept and yet so incredibly important! Thanks you Chris.

 

[Chris Fitzgerald]

It's an obvious model in suggesting the best or most effective engagement (be that playing or in practice) happens when challenge and ability are sufficiently matched (duh!). If we assume that both Anxiety and Boredom both lead to disengagement (they usually do!), is it in the interests of progress to 1) raise the 'Challenge' when in 'Flow', with the risk of creating Anxiety, or 2) keep doing the same stuff until boredom strikes and only then raise the level of 'Challenge' in the hope of moving quickly back into 'Flow' and not falling through the cracks?

I think what makes it difficult is that it’s a moving target! To your question, my answer would be either or both. The player always holds the key. I’ve been doing the same calibration exercises for the past five or six years every morning. I’m just now getting to the point where the 16th note divisions are starting to sound really clean. But I still play the quarter eighth and triplet divisions, even though they have been sounding pretty good for a while now.

The trick is, there is a level of detail possible with any exercise in the world. We will never play anything perfectly. So when playing this simpler material, the trick for me is to focus a lot harder on the minute details of it and make sure that they are clean. The faster it goes, the more I zoom out and try to keep the overall results sounding clean.

Which is a long way of saying that either of your above scenarios could work!

 

[Huy Nguyen]

@Huy Nguyen thanks for the feedback! I’ve never found looking at a tuner to be of any practical use beyond making these videos, but I know others use them as a practice tool. I’ve also had limited success with using hand shape as a guide, but that’s because I have focused on playing with a relaxed hand for the past 20 years. Different strokes, but in the end I think anything that gets the player to focus more on intonation is a good thing.

In the end, drones and metronomes (Droneomes?) are just tools to provide metrics and guardrails to practice to allow us to hone our skills. I’ve seen people use them to great positive benefit, and I’ve also seen (and heard) people who turn them on and seem to be impervious to them, almost like they are hoping that by having them on their playing will magically get better even if they don’t seem to be paying attention to them. This subset of people will play out of time with a metronome, and out of tune with a drone, seemingly not attempting to adjust to them and just doing what they re already doing.

The longer I play and the more I practice, the more convinced I become that attention - focused, undistracted attention - is the most precious resource we have. The best players play, and the best performances happen, in the “zone”, where attention is absolute and the experience is all consuming. If I could wave a magic wand and imbue all of my students with a single gift, it would be the ability to focus their attention when practicing and playing. I dont' think it's really much different than what you're doing with a drone. Same mountain, different path.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the brilliant psychologist and author of “Flow” has a great illustration of this as an image:

View attachment 7425957

This is the best illustration of focused attention I can imagine when it comes to practicing to improve skill at pretty much anything.

For me the point of a tuner isn't that one needs to be accurate or what not, but to build the embodied and kinethestic sense to what it really means to be clearly intonated against a pitch when playing solo. I don't think this is any different than you playing with a drone except what I think many players (i've been checking out how cellists deal with this) is to start with a self-reference against the harmonics to build a body sense for pythagorian tuning (lets call this PyT). Obviously it's not just the sound but also the sensed physicality in the hand. For instance my mental shortcut is that the G on the D string is a tad further the the reach of my fingers, but combined with that is to listen for the timbre and beats how the note sounds in "perfect" pitch.

I was messing around droning a 5th of the scale that I was practicing and I can sense how my bass, hands, anatomy, and bow will sound when perfect intonated and trying to remember that holistic sensation when I play the root against it. It beats a certain way and i'm not just looking at how it sounds to the ear but how the whole body is responding. That's the fascinating thing with the cellists, their whole bodies are into what they're doing.

And then when you are practicing things in an intentional way, you're trying to go from conscious to unconscious competence to borrow from Hubert Dreyfus. You're moving things from technique and procedure into a form of is-ness and being. There is a certain "living" into music that we haven't quite touched on. In a way, what you're calling Perfect Pitch is that... being present in the moment and "living into" the pitch the moment demands. That's what singers innately do when they sing harmony.

Working with a tuner is akin to a sommelier drinking wine and eating good food. For you to be able to judge wine, you must have a memory for taste so that you can make a good comparison to past vintages. So when I work with a tuner, I'm developing my taste for what I sense as being in-tune and how that is particular to me. How that perfecting intonated note "tastes" to me and how it makes me feel to make that an imprint and repeat the same thing with the same pitch on a different string for example.

I'm also familiar with Csikszentmihalyi. Food for thought: the graph you shared is basically the same as Dr. Dan Siegels Window of Tolerance when it comes the body responding to stess and trauma. Realize that flow and stress/trauma are two sides of the same coin. Flow makes you feel alive bc there is something real at stake.

 

[porkynuggets]

Following. Thanks for this fascinating thread

 

[Tom Lane]

Reading the comments about focus brought me three thoughts.

The first is that when we complain that a beginning player - or even an advanced one for that matter - isn't listening, that's inaccurate. Of course, they're listening, how can they not hear the drums and piano right next to them? But they're not focused on what those other instruments are playing, they're focused on what they're playing.

Second, developing the ability to place your focus where you want it is a valuable, more developed skill because there are times when the drummer can't swing or the guitarist is fumbling their chords and then the best thing I can do in that moment, is to place my focus on my internal beat and try to stay as steady and even as possible and NOT let them district me. That's more for student bands than for pros, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes. It's also very valuable for hearing the interaction of the different instruments by cycling through a recording while focusing on one instrument at a time. I continue to be surprised how much more detail I hear in a tune after I've worked through that exercise. I think some people call it "deep listening" but I suppose the term could refer to other types of listening too.

Third, meditation is a wonderful tool for learning to adjust and expand your focus. The very act of focusing on one thing for a sustained period is like a muscle that we can develop with practice.

 

[SteveCS]

For me the point of a tuner isn't that one needs to be accurate or what not, but to build the embodied and kinethestic sense to what it really means to be clearly intonated against a pitch when playing solo. I don't think this is any different than you playing with a drone except what I think many players (i've been checking out how cellists deal with this) is to start with a self-reference against the harmonics to build a body sense for pythagorian tuning (lets call this PyT). Obviously it's not just the sound but also the sensed physicality in the hand. For instance my mental shortcut is that the G on the D string is a tad further the the reach of my fingers, but combined with that is to listen for the timbre and beats how the note sounds in "perfect" pitch.

I was messing around droning a 5th of the scale that I was practicing and I can sense how my bass, hands, anatomy, and bow will sound when perfect intonated and trying to remember that holistic sensation when I play the root against it. It beats a certain way and i'm not just looking at how it sounds to the ear but how the whole body is responding. That's the fascinating thing with the cellists, their whole bodies are into what they're doing.

And then when you are practicing things in an intentional way, you're trying to go from conscious to unconscious competence to borrow from Hubert Dreyfus. You're moving things from technique and procedure into a form of is-ness and being. There is a certain "living" into music that we haven't quite touched on. In a way, what you're calling Perfect Pitch is that... being present in the moment and "living into" the pitch the moment demands. That's what singers innately do when they sing harmony.

Working with a tuner is akin to a sommelier drinking wine and eating good food. For you to be able to judge wine, you must have a memory for taste so that you can make a good comparison to past vintages. So when I work with a tuner, I'm developing my taste for what I sense as being in-tune and how that is particular to me. How that perfecting intonated note "tastes" to me and how it makes me feel to make that an imprint and repeat the same thing with the same pitch on a different string for example.

I'm also familiar with Csikszentmihalyi. Food for thought: the graph you shared is basically the same as Dr. Dan Siegels Window of Tolerance when it comes the body responding to stess and trauma. Realize that flow and stress/trauma are two sides of the same coin. Flow makes you feel alive bc there is something real at stake.

View attachment 7426114

Funny you should mention tolerance. I recall one of my daughter's tutors from a few years back talking about intonation being dependent not so much on the player's ability to hear in tune, but on what he called their tolerance of "out-of-tuneness". The more your ear accomodates poor intonation the less likely you are to actually play in tune or improve your intonation because you perceive no audible reason to do so!!

 

[lurk]

I gotta say for the first time ever I'm spending a little time each day with old fashioned movable do solfege. Singing and playing at the same time very slowly, and it's helping my intonation more than vomits and drones ever did. Anyone got advice on when to move that do? For example, if you were singing the melody of All the Things you'd start out do fa ti mi la la ti do ti la then what? le? mi in a new key? If you do that should you back up a bit and sing fa sol le sol fa mi? Sorry if this is too much here. I've been playing this tune for 50 years and never really got what a brilliant tonal construction it is till now.

 

[crd]

I gotta say for the first time ever I'm spending a little time each day with old fashioned movable do solfege. Singing and playing at the same time very slowly, and it's helping my intonation more than vomits and drones ever did. Anyone got advice on when to move that do? For example, if you were singing the melody of All the Things you'd start out do fa ti mi la la ti do ti la then what? le? mi in a new key? If you do that should you back up a bit and sing fa sol le sol fa mi? Sorry if this is too much here. I've been playing this tune for 50 years and never really got what a brilliant tonal construction it is till now.

I am not sure jazz and moveable do are ever going to work very well together. I would just use pitch names or the lyrics and make sure you are thinking the correct pitches.

 

[turf3]

I am not sure jazz and moveable do are ever going to work very well together. I would just use pitch names or the lyrics and make sure you are thinking the correct pitches.

I don't understand what you mean by that. The whole idea of the moveable do is for changing keys, something we do all the time in jazz and pop covers.

 

[Huy Nguyen]

Funny you should mention tolerance. I recall one of my daughter's tutors from a few years back talking about intonation being dependent not so much on the player's ability to hear in tune, but on what he called their tolerance of "out-of-tuneness". The more your ear accomodates poor intonation the less likely you are to actually play in tune or improve your intonation because you perceive no audible reason to do so!!

I gotta tell you what really drives me up the wall about hearing that tolerance and such....

Many times I've played and practiced in the room and the note sounds fine and well intonated. This is one of the reasons why I leave the tuner running. It sounds good to me but when I check the tuner I'm way off. I'm like, ***? Why does it sound ok to me but it's clearly 50 cents sharp. Is it the acoustics in my practice space? Am I crazy? Even with a drone... sounds ok with the bow but I'm 40 cents off. Maybe my hearings gone?

And here's the insanity driving part... I'll record myself playing. Listen to the recording and it sounds passable. I put on headphones, even play it through my laptop speakers, sounds ok. Then I'll render the audio as part of a video or publish it on Youtube which then downgrades the audio quality. And then bam what sounded fine is godawful. FML. Or it even sounds fine on YouTube but it gets played back through zoom and it's utter shite.

Sometimes I just want to ditch this thing and play an instrument that has frets. Maybe I should join the viola da gamba crowd....
Trust me, it's not that I'm not trying.

 

[Bruce Calin]

I will occasionally have a student, usually an adult who plays another instrument, who is so focused on playing each note in tune that it becomes difficult to focus on any other aspect of technique. One of the main things I focus on is developing a relaxed approach to all learning of new skills, such as shifting and fingering. If the student insists on stopping and fixing each perceived tuning flaw, it can be hard to get very far with anything else. My method is to play something like a scale of passage through and correct pitch or other problems on the next pass. If the student is stopping to make constant corrections when that isn't the objective, it's tough to develop a sense of continuity and pulse IMO.

 

[neilG]

Sometimes I just want to ditch this thing and play an instrument that has frets. Maybe I should join the viola da gamba crowd....

I play the viola da gamba. Trust me, no intonation problems are solved with gut strings and frets.

 

[the_Ryan]

I play the viola da gamba. Trust me, no intonation problems are solved with gut strings and frets.

Also the frets can move!

 

[neilG]

Also the frets can move!

Hopefully, they're on tight enough so they don't move while you're playing.