#STRINGED BASS RANGE PLUS#
#STRINGED BASS RANGE FREE#

If you get bored, do what a real band would do and let the bass player shape the structure of the song.

#STRINGED BASS RANGE FREE#

Taking to the extreme, if you are playing in drop Z, feel free to do the bass part in unison with the guitar through the whole song. The cleaner tone of the bass along with the rounder tone of the thicker strings will thicken up the sound better than a bunch of sloppy sounding low fart noises of a distorted bass in drop Z.ģ. It's cool to double the guitar riff in the same octave. If it sounds muddy, pull up the muddiest notes or omit more notes. If there's a particularly busy guitar riff, I like to focus on the accented notes and write something around those, maybe even just play those an octave down. The best bass players will only ever flurry notes when it's either percussive and the frequency of the tone need not be exact or when they are playing really high. Low frequencies take longer for the brain to register as tones. I feel like taking this approach works fantastically well when it comes together, but usually only when the guitar riff is particularly groovy and has a certain sort of directional flow going up or down a scale and there's not as much instrumentation going on (one guitar part, one bass part, drums, nothing else).Ģ. You can have weirdass intervals in passages, but you don't want those weird intervals on any of the stressed beats like, especially on the 1 of any motif or on any notes held longer than a quarter note (probably not even on a quarter note). This isn't trivial to achieve, though, because the bass and guitar definitely have to coordinate such that the counterpoint makes compositional sense.

I'd say that, out of their better-known songs, about 50% of the bass lines match the guitar an octave down and about 50% have the bass doing something completely different. Definitely not metal music by any stretch, but it influenced how I approach bass. As a teenager, I was a big fan (still like them) of The Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet from Canada. Maybe you can take them as suggestions or maybe you can take them as anti-suggestions for ways to prove me wrong, either way, I wish you the best of luck achieving something you personally like.ġ. Since I don't nail myself down to any one substyle, I can give you a few examples of what I do. There are a million right approaches and the only wrong approaches are the ones you don't like. This condition is referred to as the Helmholtz motion or 'Helmholtz node' after Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894).It's sort of like asking how do you play drums or how do you play guitar. For the low frequencies of the bass strings, the frequency of the stick-slip repetition can be equal to the frequency of the string, a condition associated with a full, rich tone for the instrument. The horsehair sticks to the string and pulls it to the side a certain distance and then releases it in a repetitive stick-slip pattern. The bow for the bass is typically made of black horsehair. This bridge is fitted with piezoelectric pickups on the bridge to produce an electrical output that can be amplified.Ī good description of the interaction of the bow with the string on the bass may be found on the University of New South Wales site. The large bridge on the bass instrument transfers a component of the string vibration to the top plate of the instrument.

#STRINGED BASS RANGE PLUS#

String instruments characteristically produce a fundamental resonance plus all the string harmonics.īecause of the string mass and stiffness, a geared arrangement is used to adjust the string tension. This is in contrast to the other members of the classical string family for which the tensions in the lowest pitch strings are significantly higher. Tables of string tension show tensions in the range 60 to 80 lbs for different compositions and manufacturers, but in all cases the tensions for the four strings are about the same. This is to achieve the musical fourth 4/3 pitch intervals since the string frequency is proportional to the inverse square root of the mass per unit length. For the double bass, the string tensions of the four strings are essentially equal, implying that the mass per unit length of the strings must be adjusted close to 9/16 ratios for successive strings.

The strings are tuned a fourth apart at E1(41.2 Hz), A1, D2, G2(98 Hz). The standard double bass has four strings and a range from E just over an octave below the bass staff, upwards for nearly three octaves, although some instruments may have five strings in order to extend the range downward.

The double bass, also called bass Viol or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched member of the orchestral string section.

Stringed bass range