Bass Fingering in Swing Music

Video Transcript

"Now I just want to take a second to explain the correct fingering technique for approaching the bass, and it's very important that you do this. You don't want to get tendinitis. You can ruin your fingers, and not be able to play the instrument for the rest of your life. You'll have to pick up the drums or something else, so, what you want to do is use only your first, your second, and your fourth finger, especially in the low register. As you get up higher on the bass, it's all right, it's more natural to use your fourth finger in there. But, lower on the bass you want to just use your first, second, and fourth. And a good technique for doing this is going up to the octave. And you should get there on your fourth finger right on the last ten, and that's great practice and technique for getting your fingering down. And again, we'll go over telling you how you find your first four frets but as for getting in the rest of the frets that's a good technique as well. But you want to always use one, two, and four, and you want to keep your thumb centered in the back of the neck right here, like a C clamp, like this. You want to really push down. So really, when you're playing you want this C clamp on the fretboard, and you want to use one, two, and four, and really think of that third finger as glued to your middle finger, 'cause that's what it's there for."