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Moving down strings without raking?

#24
sammyp said:
I can' t stop raking so i've decided to roll with it a made a few exercises to help me with independence of starting lines with either the first or second finger....they're very simple but effective i think.....ill post em later
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My bass instructor isn't a big fan of raking. He caught me doing it during a session and had me practice my routines saying 1-2 out loud 1=index 2=middle. Caught myself numerous times raking going down the strings out of habit, but after practicing out loud, managed to errr... "not do it much"
 
#25
onosson said:
I'm a little confused about reference to "moving down". I have always heard, in music pedagogical terms, the G string on a bass referred to as the bottom string, and the E as the top.
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I'm not sure who you are hearing that from, but discussions such as these should be based on pitch, not the relationship of a string with the floor.

E is the lowest string, as in "low E." G is the highest string, and "high G" is the octave on that string. I think the difference is best discerned by using the terms "high" and "low" rather than "top" and "bottom."
 
#26
FretlessMainly said:
I'm not sure who you are hearing that from, but discussions such as these should be based on pitch, not the relationship of a string with the floor.

E is the lowest string, as in "low E." G is the highest string, and "high G" is the octave on that string. I think the difference is best discerned by using the terms "high" and "low" rather than "top" and "bottom."
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I think it may stem from classical guitar terminology, at least the way I've seen it taught. I tend to think of it in the way you suggest, myself - but whenever I hear people discussing "top" and "bottom" strings, I try to make a point to clarify what they are referring to - the pitch, or the position in relation to the guitar body.
 
#27
Well, there are many conventions, and at the end of it all, you/we just need to know what the basis for some terminology is for the purposes of a discussion. It can be frustrating; on bass, I've only ever used pitch as the basis for these types of discussions, and my experience over 32 years is that pitch is the fundamentally-used metric.
 

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