Slide right into your bass journey, as the great Steve Lawson gets you up and running with low-end rudiments
Beginners Lesson
After last month’s look at sustain, let’s take some time to revisit one of the most expressive techniques that we can couple with those long notes – slides! No, not bits of metal or glass pipe on our fingers – those can be great fun too, but probably not within the context of a beginner column. Today we’re going to talk about sliding notes along the neck.
Sliding offers us a number of different ways to alter our musical choices in any given situation. It offers a novel way to get between two notes; a way to change position if we have a line that won’t fit into a four-fret span on our bass; a way to approach any note to give it some movement; and a cool effect. However, where we’re going to start is directly linked to the sustain we were talking about last month. Once we’ve mastered the art of maximising sustain, we can combine it with slides to get super-smooth lines that have a very distinct quality to them.
Remember our various conversations about the shape of a note and ADSR – Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release? When you slide into a note without picking it again, there can be almost no noticeable attack on the second note. The pitch of the note has changed, and you might hear some of the characteristic sound of the slide itself if the line is fairly exposed – but there’s no ‘bump’ at the start of the note. This has a very different effect than a line where each note is accented by being activated with your picking hand.
Whether we pick, slap, strum, twang or palm-mute the note, that ‘bump’ on the beat defines the shape of the groove. Remove it, and we give the bass room to have a completely different impact on the overall tune.
Let’s jump straight into this idea with this month’s first exercise: Here, we pluck the note D (referring back to our strategies for maximising sustain from last month) and then slide up to the F. This is a good one to practise with a drum beat or metronome, because sliding so that the F lands on the beat can be a little tricky to learn. We may be removing the accent from the second note, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it to land in time!
Gradually slow the line down and see what the decay on the first note does to the second one. At what point does the second note become noticea
