That other use for your thumb

[Matthew Fisher]

Ray Pohlman!

The plot thickens. Someone else mentioned that Brian Wilson played with his thumb, but the credits for this Beach Boys track say Ray Pohlman, bass.

Edit: micguy explained the situation in his comment. Brian Wilson didn't play on all of the Beach Boys' material. It was just a funny coincidence that Pohlman was one of the session pros for the Beach Boys.

 

[Matthew Fisher]

Brian didn't play on some of their albums - the glory days in particular. Brian did conducting and arranging, studio musicians ("The Wrecking Crew") did the instrumental parts. Carole Kaye played electric bass, and she used a pick.

Aha! I love talkbass. Thank you.

 

[micguy]

Aha! I love talkbass. Thank you.

I didn't invent Talkbass, I just happen to have listened to way too many podcasts about such things. So, you're welcome for my little part.

 

[Matthew Fisher]

Monk Montgomery and Toy Caldwell (Marshall Tucker Band) . Both had brothers who played electric guitar with the thumb also.

Here's Caldwell doing a nice solo. It was actually Tommy on bass and Toy on guitar, as I just found out. Talk about confusing names.

Edit: Wait a minute. He switched to pick halfway through. Heresy!

 

[Dana R Gregory]

Oh sweet. I love his stuff. I actually thought he was using a pick because the Beach Boys had a pretty good attack on their bass sound, at least in some of the stuff from the tail end of their glory days.

The clean attack could be attributed to Carol Kay who played on several of their recordings.

 

[Sid Fang]

I played several other instruments, including acoustic and electric guitar, before picking up bass. So I started out playing bass with a pick. When I got tired of my jazz purist buddies making fun of me, and decided it was time to learn to do without one, I went through a period of playing bass classical guitar style, with thumb-index-middle-ring playing E-A-D-G. It's a pretty natural technique, but I found it too hard to match the dynamics and tone of the thumb strokes to my fingers, and I evolved to my current, floating, middle-finger-leads, no-thumb-notes technique. But I could easily have turned out otherwise. There have to be a lot of guys out there who play bass "flamenco style".

 

[Les Fret]

Now hang on. This is a funny thought. Wes Montgomery was famous for playing octaves. How'd he do that just plucking with his thumb?

I've watched a few videos of his TV appearances just now, and I found a few passages where it sounds like he's doing octaves, but he's not fretting notes on adjacent strings. Some guys would have hands large enough to make that stretch, but he's fretting octaves the usual way, with one string in between the strings he's fretting.

Is he somehow muting the string in the middle? You can't pluck non-adjacent strings with your thumb without plucking the one in the middle.

Yes it is very common to play octaves on guitar like that by muting the middle string.

 

[Les Fret]

Does anybody else have a bassist they really appreciate who plucks with their thumb?

I don't mean the guys that use their thumb to pluck as one tool in a rich toolbox of techniques, like Damian Erskine. I mean the guys for whom this is just how they play, like Armando Hernández of Los Dos Carnales. People who use the thumb plucking technique from the tug bar era, before Larry Graham and Louis Johnson repurposed that appendage.

I think Armando also uses his fingers to pluck occasional high notes as well, using a sort of "fingerstyle guitar" technique. Edit: Actually his technique is more diverse than I initially thought. I hadn't paid much attention to his hands and saw a particular video where he favored his thumb. But anyway I'm interested if there's anybody you like who plucks with their thumb without necessarily being a "technical" player.

Do you have a clip of that bass player showing that technique? There are so many ways to play with the thumb so it is hard to know what you mean exactly.

 

[ZB5]

Brian didn't play on some of their albums - the glory days in particular. Brian did conducting and arranging, studio musicians ("The Wrecking Crew") did the instrumental parts. Carole Kaye played electric bass, and she used a pick.

Mad respect for Carol Kaye!

 

[ZB5]

The plot thickens. Someone else mentioned that Brian Wilson played with his thumb, but the credits for this Beach Boys track say Ray Pohlman, bass.

Edit: micguy explained the situation in his comment. Brian Wilson didn't play on all of the Beach Boys' material. It was just a funny coincidence that Pohlman was one of the session pros for the Beach Boys.

If I’m not mistaken, Ray played the part on I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which I love and is such a great representation of how Brian composed his bass parts. I also respect Brian for recognizing that to do the music he wanted, he was cool with other more technically skilled musicians to realize his written part.

 

[Matthew Fisher]

If I’m not mistaken, Ray played the part on I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which I love and is such a great representation of how Brian composed his bass parts. I also respect Brian for recognizing that to do the music he wanted, he was cool with other more technically skilled musicians to realize his written part.

I definitely respect that insight on his part as well.

Do you have a clip of that bass player showing that technique? There are so many ways to play with the thumb so it is hard to know what you mean exactly.

There weren't a whole lot of ways to use a thumb in the tug bar era but I'd be curious to see any alternatives that people have invented. But I guess the question needs to have some parameters, so the idea is you pluck the strings of a bass guitar with just one digit, and that digit is your thumb. The old school way was a lot like the way a thumb is used in fingerstyle guitar.

I'd post the exact video but Los Dos Carnales have a lot of videos and it turns out he doesn't play that way all the time, so I'm having trouble finding the exact video.