Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
practice. really slowly, like beat by beat, to figure out the "interleave" until the two separate things become one thing with two parts. I really enjoy doing it once I've got it, but I'm not a natural, always find this to be the hardest aspect of singing and bass playing in particular.
I can't imagine singing anything while playing anything. I've tried "oooohs" and "aaaahs" when the guitar player pestered me to the point of giving in and I ended up ooohing and aaahing and not playing. How anyone sings and plays is beyond me.
I've accomplished it on occasion. It takes having the bass line down to muscle memory, and playing it on auto-pilot, and concentrating on the vocal line only for me. It gives me a weird out of body feeling when I do it. I see guys like Geddy and just shake my head in wonder. I can easily sing things like Hendrix and Metallica, because the vocal lines follow the guitar rhythm for the most part, but against the grain is really, really tough.
Learn the bassline first and get it tight on the metronome. Then try singing to it. Don't quit, even though it will demoralize you at first, eventually you will be able to pull it off.
I recently wrote a song on bass where my fingers were going in one direction and my vocal was going in another. I got the bassline tight, and suffered for a few weeks through daily practice of the vocal over it and it's finally happening.
I'm not sure how I could write a song that went in two different directions and not be able to play it straightaway, but...
I recently wrote a song on bass where my fingers were going in one direction and my vocal was going in another. I got the bassline tight, and suffered for a few weeks through daily practice of the vocal over it and it's finally happening.
I'm not sure how I could write a song that went in two different directions and not be able to play it straightaway, but...
I hear ya, some song are next to impossible to sing and play. I read you have to have both your playing part and vocals totally committed to memory. I never used to do vocals, now I do a large percentage of the singing. The more we run through them the easier it gets.
There is no getting around it you gotta do the work.
-Learn both the bass and vocal parts separately inside out.....that's in time in at least two unrelated keys at varying tempos from way too fast to painfully slow.
-Practice both parts together concentrating on nailing one part without worrying too much about mistakes in the other....then switch. Give it weeks...months....years and you will start to hear both parts together.
My bass playing is kinda average and singing is mediocre so often I simply can't get both together nailed just like the recording. But I can usually come to a compromise that's musical and keeps the vibe and spirit of the song.
Just a note on rushing and bad time in general is that it's often a result of not knowing the part well enough and/or not listening intensely enough. You can't control something you're not aware of.
Yup. This is how I broke the whole process into baby steps, the last time I ran into that kind of trouble (coda to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", playing the bass and singing the spanish):
1. I wrote out the bass line and the vocal part on paper. (I used standard music notation, two staves. But you could chart out the beats on graph paper or something. Whatever you're comfortable with, as long as it shows which beats each note falls on and how they interleave.)
2. Set the bass aside, just sit at a table and learn to tap out the two parts with my fingers:
2a. Tap the bass part with my left hand, while counting out loud and/or using a metronome. Repeat until I can do this at a variety of tempos, from very slow to a little faster than performance tempo.
2b. Repeat with the vocal part in my right hand.
2c. Now do both, at first so slowly that I have time to think: ok, here comes the "and" of two, that'll be my left hand's turn, now here's the three, that's both at once.... Then up the tempo gradually as I get comfortable.
3. When I can tap both parts together at any tempo, learn to sing the vocal part while tapping the bass part. Again:
3a. Make sure I can still tap the bass part with one hand at any tempo.
3b. Practice just the vocal part till I can do it comfortably at any tempo.
3c. *Slowly* do both at once, then speed up as I get comfortable.
4. Repeat with bass and vocal:
4a. Practice the bass part on its own.
4b. Practice the vocal part on its own.
4b. Practice both together.
If I get stuck, I go back to tapping.
It sounds really painful, but it's surprising how fast it goes once you get the feeling for how they interleave. And once you get it up to tempo, you'll find you no longer think about the interleaving: instead you just feel the two lines as independent lines.
The annoying thing is that some people who are really good at this will tell you that's all they do: just think about the two separate lines, and play them together. My sneaking suspicion is that once upon a time they actually did a lot of practice learning to zipper two parts together like this, and it's so long ago that they've forgotten it. But, maybe they really just have rhythmic-independence superpowers, I don't know.
Last edited:
I sang that one in the last band I was in and yeah it took me a long while to get it, but man, once I did, what a freakin' blast! Much to my chagrin, though, we didn't do the Cream version (more like Albert King, I think it was). Still, interweaving the two, especially when the vocal line "slacks" on the timing a bit, that's just tough, but what a feeling when it works!
"If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all"!
"The Cowboy Song" by Thin Lizzy was another great one - I felt like a spastic the first time I tried to do the lines together! 
Also, I meant to say: that feeling when they start to fit together? It's the best thing ever. It's one of the reasons I love practicing, and love music.
So stick with it, I absolutely think it's the kind of thing you can figure out in a reasonable amount of time if you take it carefully, and it is so. much. fun. The day after I get it I'll be waiting at a bus stop tapping the rhythms out with my fingers and grinning like an idiot.
Back in his days with The Police, Sting played some pretty cool - often syncopated - lines while singing. In the same years, I - like Sting - was lead stinger on bass in a trio.
My band's style differed plenty from The Police's. Even so, I paid attention when an interviewer asked him about his singing and playing bass at the same time.
Note: Sting's vocal timing and melodies bear no apparent connection to or relationship with his bass parts. They're completely parallel nearly all of the time.
His secret: Practice both together slowed down, over and over, until it's easy to do both at the tune's natural tempo. Eventually, even complex parallel parts become easy to perform simultaneously. It just takes a lot of repetition, slowed down 'til you're ready to pick up the pace.
My band's style differed plenty from The Police's. Even so, I paid attention when an interviewer asked him about his singing and playing bass at the same time.
Note: Sting's vocal timing and melodies bear no apparent connection to or relationship with his bass parts. They're completely parallel nearly all of the time.
His secret: Practice both together slowed down, over and over, until it's easy to do both at the tune's natural tempo. Eventually, even complex parallel parts become easy to perform simultaneously. It just takes a lot of repetition, slowed down 'til you're ready to pick up the pace.
In my experience the rhythm is harder to get down than anything else when you're singing too. Maybe try tapping your right hand, or playing open strings in time with the song until you've got the plucking hand "pattern" down completely. You can even do the same thing with the vocals, simply humming along as you play
Disclaimer: I'm not particularly good at singing or playing a bass
Disclaimer: I'm not particularly good at singing or playing a bass
For the tricky passages write out the vocal line and the bass line, synchronized. Convert the smallest subdivision of time to one beat each. For example- on Celebration, convert each sixteenth note to quarter notes/one beat. When you count 16/4 or sixteen beats per measure, there is no syncopation to cause you to stumble. Start at a slow tempo. As you get the order of things (sing, play, play, sing) in place, slowly increase tempo. As tempo gets faster, then use cut time until you get up to speed in 4/4.
"The Cowboy Song" by Thin Lizzy was another great one - I felt like a spastic the first time I tried to do the lines together!
Awesome song! And congrats for nailing it down!
Mine was Good Times Bad Times by Zeppelin. If you'll notice, the vocal line always drags behind at the end of each verse line. So, as if playing that great John Paul Jones octave/arpeggio riff and singing wasn't hard enough, now I gotta drag the vocals at the end.
Also, doing Don't Stop Believing by Journey with that syncopated bass line and....well....holding on by my fingernails trying to sing Steve Perry.
OP, what has worked for me is purely nailing the bass line to the point that it is muscle memory. And then, as others have said, slow it down so you plug every note and every syllable into its own space.
The only time I reverse this method is a blues song with a walking bass line. I sing the song so many times I could do it in my sleep so I can actually make up a walking bass line while singing.
Singing and playing off rhythm is bar none the hardest thing I have done in my 30 years of playing. But it is also the most rewarding. I first saw singing as a chore....a duty I performed reluctantly to give another singer a break....or to make the band sound fuller with good backups. Now I love it.
Never mind that vocals has gotten me every bit as many gigs as bass so there's that.
I've been working on singing and playing "spirits in the material world," so I feel your pain on this exact issue. A lot of the stuff I've done that seems tough to sing and play at the same time actually has a bit of call and response to it -- there's a sustained note in the vocals while the bass is moving and vice versa. Listen carefully to where that happens and take advantage of it to turn your attention where it is needed at the moment.
sing the part while tapping out the bass line rhythm with your plucking hand. That's something you can do even in the car or wherever, no bass required.
Go slow with it, like others have mentioned. there's good software programs to slow down pieces and still have them sound pretty good. Practicing things at extremely slow tempos has proven to be really helpful for me. I don't even understand how that works, but it does.
sing the part while tapping out the bass line rhythm with your plucking hand. That's something you can do even in the car or wherever, no bass required.
Go slow with it, like others have mentioned. there's good software programs to slow down pieces and still have them sound pretty good. Practicing things at extremely slow tempos has proven to be really helpful for me. I don't even understand how that works, but it does.
