Basic Boogie Woogie: How to Play Rockabilly Upright Bass

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Ken Steiner for expertvillage.com. We’re going to start with very simple boogie woogie line and I’m going to play it without slap just so you can see what we’re going to be dealing with in the lessons to come. Here’s a very simple boogie woogie line in the key of G…..that example is a very standard line I didn’t vary it a little bit but it’s what most people see as a pretty standard line, I didn’t do any slapping here and this is the way say a jazz player might play when he’s playing a blue’s or a jump tune. One thing you’ll realize is that it has a certain volume to it it’s not terribly loud it depends how loud your bass is of course but what you’ll find is when you stop playing slap you’re going to pickup the volume in fact one of the reasons I probably did slap was started by players long ago to try to get more volume out of the bass. You’re playing in front of the band you don’t have a microphone back in those days you want to be heard, so the slap technique as you’ll see in the up coming lessons will increase your volume, that is sometimes in issue if you want to go back and forth between the nonslap and the slap techniques you have to deal with that that you play on, you don’t want to all sudden be very loud and very soft just because you’re playing differently, something you’re going to have to work on if you start playing slap."