What is your secret sauce

[Willie5String]

Been playing a long time. Still trying to figure some things out
How do you play in the pocket
How do you select the right note (this is my Achilles heel)
Get “your” sound
Not play the root on 1

 

[AGCurry]

Secret sauce? It's not a secret, but ...

Listen. Not only to those with whom you're playing, but to bass lines in music you'd like to play.
Analyze. Break down bass lines that interest you and figure out why they're interesting.
Practice. Not only solo, but with recordings.
Learn. Take lessons or ask another respected bassist to give you some pointers.
Play. With others. A lot.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

By the way,
1) playing the root on the downbeat is *usually* entirely appropriate;
2) do the things in the list, and you will get "your" sound.

My first experience with bass was at the age of 15, before I had a bass. I would play along with my tiny record collection, just the bass lines. Simple stuff like Rolling Stones and Paul Revere and the Raiders.

My first bass gig was in a "rock musical" at the University of Kansas. Bass lines were not written. Between rehearsals I would plan my bass lines note by note. In retrospect, I think it was excellent experience.

 

[BassChuck]

Playing in the pocket has 2 valuable parts to it.
1.) you have to know the neck well enough that you can get to the right note at exactly the time you need to be there.
2.) you have to play an appropriate note. And for that you need to know the neck well enough to know where they all are so that (read #1).

Listen to as much music as you can. Anything that catches your ear as interesting, play on your bass. That can be nursery rhythms, TV commercials, church songs, anything. And play them in several keys, maybe all of them, and know what notes you are playing (see #1). Get all the music you love in your head, and in your hands.
But you really have to know the neck. Really well, never stop getting better at that. Imagine this: You go to hear the very best bassoon player in the world (maybe in all history). Hand them your bass and ask them to play a simple blues walking line.... you'll get nothing. (because they don't know the neck!)

 

[stratovani]

Two pointers here:
1. You play music to practice music, and you practice music to play music. Playing do-re-mi scales is a good way to bore yourself. Play along to songs, listen to them first, learn the note sequences, then play along using the roots.

2. From the 10 Commandments of Bass: F--k up the notes if thou must, but never f--k up the groove. In other words, it's OK to play different notes than what the original bass player was playing, so long as the groove is there.

 

[Gorn]

Not play the root on 1

Why not?

 

[mambo4]

How do you play in the pocket

First you need to develop a concise and useful definition of "pocket", a term for which useless definitions abound. The best I've heard put forth is thinking of the pocket as the space between the kick and the snare. Implicit in this idea is knowing, listening and responding to the drum part.

 

[bikeplate]

God given ability and about 4000 gigs. I was a sponge when i started. Wanted to be as good as possible.

 

[lowphatbass]

Been playing a long time. Still trying to figure some things out
How do you play in the pocket
How do you select the right note (this is my Achilles heel)
Get “your” sound
Not play the root on 1

There’s no secret sauce for this. One player’s ideal perfection is another’s mundane.
My general advise for this would listening. By that I mean identify the bassists that you feel have that “sauce” and spend time listening to their performances, get inside their parts, learn them as accurately as possible. Honestly, just by spending time really listening that sauce will start soaking in.

 

[JW56789]

Play in the pocket? Stay the hell away from bad drummers as much as you can, and when you're with a good one, listen, listen, listen, and ask questions. Plus remember: You and a drummer may get tight as hell, but the rest of the band has to do their part. Whether they want to or not. To think of groove, the whole band has to feel it . . . . . and feed it.

You select the right note generally by playing less than what you thought it needed, then feeding in a few little accents or fills in just the right place. Playing the Right Note and Playing Too Much will never be compatible for us mere mortals who aren't Jaco or Stanley Clarke, and I'm not either one. Any damn fool can play too much (I should know . . . . .), but what separates the best from the rest is knowing what to leave OUT.

Your sound is a mental, psychoacoustic thing that's as individual as your fingerprint. You know what you want to sound like. So get there, tweak it a bit if it's too raucous or too dead for the bandstand, but it's there, and when you hit it, the little light will come on. Hand me an Alembic and some monstrous, high-end rig, or a Squier and a practice amp, if you give me a minute twiddling knobs, it will sound like me. No doubt the Alembic rig would sound like a better me, but that same tone is just what I hear and what I sound like.

News flash: You're probably going to have to play a lot of roots on the one, unless you're playing lots of jazz or less conventional music. I'll hold a 5 under a 1-5-1 tag at the end of a song sometimes, but otherwise, it's just kinda what you do. To get really confused with this, listen to Steely Dan's 'Time Out of Mind', where the chord changes sound like fives on the root . . . . . . but it's not.

These are questions we all deal with in our own way, and conquer some of them better than others, but sometimes, you're just in situations where attitudes and habits of the people you wind up playing with can just suck the soul right out of you, and make you wonder why the hell you thought you wanted to play, and make these questions seem impossible to make any progress with. Been there.

Never, never again.

 

[SteveCS]

Been playing a long time. Still trying to figure some things out
...
How do you select the right note (this is my Achilles heel)
...

I don't know where you are in terms of genre or style, what your goals are or what you think your difficulties are so it's difficult to pitch a response, but here are some general principles that might help...

Notes don't tend to exist in isolation. Rather they exist in small groups or clusters. Groups of notes that appear together at the same time are called chords, and those that appear one after the other over time are melody. Generally, the notes (pitches) of the chords and those of the melody are taken from the same larger group, known as the key. Keys consist of one or more scales, which are just subsets of all possible notes.
So your first task in note selection is knowing which notes are available to you...

The most important note in a chord is the root note, and most chords in most music appear in root position, which means the root is at the bottom. So, as the 'keeper of the bottom end', the bass players' focus must be roots. That means being mindful of them even if we're not actually playing them.

The second most important note of a chord is the 3rd. This usually defines the 'quality' of the chord as major or minor. The 'quality' of the chords within a key follows set patterns. Look up 'harmonising the major scale' as a starting point for which notes to focus on when building bass lines.
Harmonising the minor key is a bit more complicated, but the process is the same.

Bear in mind that putting notes other that the root at the bottom of a chord is a powerful tool that can change entire harmonic structures, and not always for the best! Take a C major chord and put E in the bass, it's still a C chord. Put an A in the bass, without changing anything else, and suddenly you now have Am7!

In terms of melody, individual notes are like letters in a word - meaningless when looked at alone. Melody is made by small groups of notes arranged in rhythm over time. Within these smaller groups or 'phrases', melodies tend to move by step, that is to say notes next to each other in the scale, with larger jumps being made between phrases. Again these notes are usually taken from the key, and usually revolve around the notes of the chord being played at any given time*. So if you are looking to write a melody (and bass lines are often melodies in their own right) or improvise a solo the notes of the key, the subset of notes used in the current chord and the notes of the next chord are the best places to look for clues of what the right note(s) might be.

* Music is frequently composed the other way around - taking a melody and adding the chords (harmonising) around it - so this 'backwards compatibility' should come as no surprise.

YMMV

 

[Tom Bomb]

Secret Sauce

ingredients:

study
time
study time

method:

Combine and serve.​

 

[Bob_Ross]

Lottsa good advice in this thread, read it all and soak it up!

I'll just offer a couple thoughts on this one

Not play the root on 1

How To Not Play The Root On 1 requires that you absolutely confidently definitively know two things:
- What the root is
- Where 1 is
...followed very closely by a third thing:
- What all the other available chord tones and tensions are

And then I would look at How To Not Play The Root On 1 as a twofold problem:
- How To Not Play On 1
- How To Select Notes Other Than The Root To Play Over A Chord

Develop the knowledge so you can assuredly answer items 1-3 in realtime. Then apply them to the two halves of the twofold problem separately first...and then combined.