BassElectric Bass · the listening room

the listening room

The instrument holding it all up

Before you learn to play it, learn to hear it. This room is about the lock — the bass and the kick drum landing on the same instant — and about the strange fact that the part nobody consciously notices is the part everything else is standing on.

where you've heard it

The instrument you feel more than you notice.

The bass is the foundation. It does two jobs at once, and it does both of them so quietly that most listeners never consciously hear it. First, it locks with the kick drum: the two of them together are what makes a song feel like it is moving, the thing that gets your head nodding before you have decided to.

Second, it tells your ear what chord everything else is sitting on. The same handful of notes up top will sound happy, sad or unresolved depending entirely on which note the bass puts underneath them. Take the bass out of a song and it doesn't get quieter — it collapses.

the players who shaped it

  1. iJames JamersonPlayed on a great many Motown hits, largely uncredited during his lifetime, using a Fender Precision bass.
  2. iiPaul McCartneyShowed a bass line could be a melody in its own right.
  3. iiiJaco PastoriusBrought the fretless electric bass forward as a solo voice.
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What to listen for

One gesture tells you the bass is doing its job: the root-note lock. The bass lands on the bottom note of the chord, exactly on the beat, exactly with the kick drum. Hear the line by itself first. Then hear the identical line with the kit underneath it — and notice that the bass part did not change at all.

the lock — same notes, twice

120 bpm · 2 bars
1
E
root
● kick
2
E
root
◦ snare
3
G
3rd
● kick
4
A
4th
◦ snare
1
E
root
● kick
2
E
root
◦ snare
3
G
3rd
● kick
4
A
4th
◦ snare

On its own the line is honest work and not much more: four notes, one per beat, the root E underneath the first two.

Now add the kit. The kick drum falls on beats 1 and 3 — the same instants the bass moves — and the two sounds stop being two sounds. The drum gives the note a punch it never had; the note gives the drum a pitch it never had. That fused thing is what people mean when they say a band is tight.

Nothing was added to the bass. The bass simply got something to lock into. That is the entire job, and it is why bass players spend their lives listening to drummers.

where it came from

The upright — the double bass — came first: enormous, fretless, and awkward to carry anywhere. Then in 1951Leo Fender's Precision Bass arrived: a bass you could carry, fret accurately and amplify. Those three things together changed popular music, because for the first time the foundation of a band could go wherever the band went, play in tune without guesswork, and be heard.

and if you want to make that sound yourself

Four strings, one job, and a groove that falls apart without you. Go and be the floor.

▸ Start the beginner course →∑ Why low notes are long — the maths →