Right Hand Slap Bass Techniques

Series Summary

Can you feel the groove? Does that funky beat make you wanna move? Can you hear that far out bass guitar slapping and popping like the gospel truth? Don’t you wanna dance? Or are you an uptight cat, always worried about your situation? Free your mind, man, and the rest will follow. Stop thinkin’ so hard and let go. I promise you, that icky sticky funk music is the best medicine for the blues. So get your groove in motion and bust some seams out on the dance floor.

Funk music is characterized by its unique ability to blend simple rhythms and repetitive melodies into something bigger. Once the band fires up, the notes take on a life of their own. The bass line works its way into your hips; the drum beat makes you move your feet; the guitar and keyboards take you to some of the funkiest places in the cosmos.

In these music lesson video clips, learn how to play slap bass from one of the original Motown players, Tony Newton. His years of expertise and easy-to-follow teaching style will have you slappin and poppin in no time flat. Learn other bass techniques as well, such as how to do thumb rakes, how to play triplets, palm muting tips, and how to strum the bass. Come, sit at the feet of the master, and learn what he has to teach you about that heavy-stringed axe you know and love: the bass guitar.

Video Transcript

"Okay I'm Tony Newton From Expert Village and we are talking about slap bass today. So the first thing we're going to deal with is hand and finger position. Let's start off with the right hand. When you're slapping a bass the main thing is to play with the meaty part, the bony meaty part of your thumb, so that you can get a good decent tone. Now, I am using my left hand just to get some tone. Just to hold it. If I don't play any strings it sounds like this. So that's just one string. You want to be able to do this. Place your finger for those of you who have 4 string basses, it's the same basic thing. Go over each string, pick a note like "G" and hit the note, so that you can try it on your neck and try it up and down, from the middle of the pickups to about this far on the neck. As you can see you get different tones each way. So what you want to do first is get a good decent tone on each one of the strings. Even the high ones. You want to be able to get comfortable with making notes anywhere on the neck. The next thing that you want to be able to do is want to be able to play different notes with your left hand. Let's take three or four notes and go on up and down the neck. Okay. Now, to make things nice while you're practicing you always think musical while you are playing. Let's just play some quarter notes and just get a groove. Always be of, what I call your internal metronome. So, always hear the tempo first. Start off with a whole note. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1,2 ,3, 4, etc... Then what we are going to do, we're going to add some muting or other notes to that. Now we will have to lift up the left hand. I'm counting in 8ths (1 and 2 and 3 and 4) inside while i'm playing. That's not the sound we want. We want....(playing music). That means you only push down on beat one. 1,2,3,4... 2, 2, 3,4... etc...We'll stop for now, just keep practicing that and then we'll go over the rhythm on this next slate."