Wulf's Webden

Having done a bunch of stuff, we’re now onto “More Stuff” (pp. 27-32).

It starts by introducing the idea of riffs that extend over two bars, giving a simple “question and answer” (what I’d tend to refer to as “call and response”). The illustration is a classic rock’n’roll riff (all 8ths): 1 1 3 3 5 5 6 5 | b7 b7 6 6 5 5 3 3. The pattern is shown just for the A chords in the 12 bar blues, with the single bar 11 using just the first part of the riff. Next, the D and E chords are filled in also with the first measure of the riff moved to appropriate starting points.

I seem to recall the next two bar riff was a bit trickier. The first half is just quarter notes (1 5 b7 8 ) but the answer puts in some syncopation (e e_e e q q, with the underscore representing a tie). It’s not that hard but it was a step up to a new level of rhythmic complexity. There’s yet another ramp up just over the page (p.30), with more rhythms, including a second bar that has everything but the 1 on an upbeat (e e_e e_e e_e e). Not only that but it makes a couple of tweaks to the notes from A to E (bar 8 going into 9) and the final bar to lead better into the changes. Phew! However, once on top of that peak, you can keep up with a whole range of riff-based, blues-based songs.

More examples follow and that critical word I used in my previous paragraph, syncopation, is finally introduced. The chapter rounds out with another pattern with variations that is very similar to “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream. That probably gave me a head start the first time I was in a band that covered the song although it isn’t an exact transcription. Once you’ve put in the work, you are well set up for a lot of music, although the amount of work isn’t to be underestimated. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took me as long to get through this one chapter as all the rest of the book up to that point. Maybe it should have been called “Lots More Stuff”!

Time for the next chapter: “Rhythm and Stuff” (pp. 22-26). The first revelation is that you can play more than quarter notes. Eighth notes and the 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & count are explained, along with riff #1 in doubled eighths. I like the way the book keeps on circling back to earlier concepts and doing the same thing again but with just the one extra tweak.

I’m a little less keen on the following page, which illustrates right hand technique. Some lovely line drawings are used but the book is very clear that you rest your thumb on the E string or let it float well out of the way when you want that string and that all strokes on higher strings should come to rest on the string below. There’s some mileage in that but I think they are missing some important nuances. I’m not sure how long I persisted with this method because, on the Hohner 500/3 bass I started on, it was easy to slide the strings off the little bits of fretwire they went over at the bridge if you rested on them too hard! I think I went to the “rest on the pickup approach” and was more than ready when I heard about the way of the floating thumb!

I’m also a bit surprised to find that, although alternating the fingers is introduced, they start off with the middle finger leading (although index-leading patterns are introduced before long). Anyway, we’re back into action with another variant of the riff, all in eighths (A A E E G E G a). That is written out in full but followed by a series of other riffs that you are left to move around on your own. The first covers a four fret range (A A C# C# E E F# E) and then we get further riffs that alternate quarter and eighth notes and even introduce ties, giving our first taste of syncopation, although that fancy word isn’t mentioned.

All of these are meant to be played along with the backing track on the record. As I recall, this was the second section where the learning curve seemed suddenly steeper (the first was going from open strings to fretted notes). Nowadays, it all looks very basic but it felt like scaling heady heights when I was starting off.

One other point I’d note is at the bottom of p. 23. Apparently “Many studio players favor using the pick because of the crispness of the attack. In rock, however, the use of the pick causes the bass to lose some of its punch.” To me, that’s another reminder that this book was written long, long ago in a galaxy quite far away and that it wasn’t entirely to be trusted in its sweeping statements. Even looking at the photos included with the book, I’d be inclined to say that approaching a third of the ones showing people playing bass are making use of a pick (although I’m sometimes judging that from the overall hand position – not many picking / plucking hand close-ups).

Anyway, we’ve certainly reached the point where you could head out and start gigging, as long as that gig consisted entirely of 12 bar blues in A and you could approach every song by playing each bar as a repeated riff starting on the appropriate note! We’re going to be climbing further soon though.

We’re onto “Riffs – 1” (pp. 15-18), in order to play “moving bass lines”. The first couple of pages use both tablature and fretboard diagrams to illustrate a simple riff – A on the fifth fret of the E string with the first finger, E on the 7th fret of the A string with the third finger, G on the fifth fret of the D string with the first finger and A on the 7th fret of the same string, back to the third finger. After some time to practise that, the same riff is shown starting with the D (A string, fret 5) and E (A string, fret 7). Completing the section, a fully tabbed example of using the riff to play along with the 12 bar blues progression is given.

The bass I was playing the first time round was a short scale instrument and, in my gangly teenage phase, the stretch using 1 and 3 at the fifth or seventh frets was within my reach. Personally, I’d still have preferred to see the use of 1 and 4 on the fretting hand, which is how I’d normally play it today. On the positive side, it is a riff that I’ll still bust out from time to time today, particularly for blues jams where every chord is a dominant 7. I do continue to have doubts about just how good this book is as a teaching resource but there is no doubt that it has left its imprint on my playing.

After “Riffs – 1”, we come to “Riffs – 2”. In some senses, it doesn’t take us a lot further. We’re still playing almost the same riff as the last chapter over exactly the same blues progression but we do learn a couple of similar but different riffs we can use. We’re learning more about fitting riffs into a progression and how they can be varied. Almost under the radar, the suggestion is also given that you don’t have to play exactly the same riff all the way through the song and permission is given to make up your own riffs, with the sole criteria that they sound good. I’d say that both are still elements of my playing today and this is probably where I picked them up.

Marks against this chapter? There’s a misprint at the bottom of page 20 where the final riff on an E chord is shown starting on the seventh fret of the E string range than the seventh of the A string. Given that there is also text saying where it should be (we’re getting a bit of extra gloss over the basic tablature, that is definitely a mistake. That’s relatively minor although worth pencilling in a correction.

FWIW, I was doing some bass teaching recently and meeting a new student. I found myself quickly talking about simple riffs around blues progressions and using the riff from yesterday’s chapter before moving onto a variant… which turned out to be the riff from today’s chapter! This stuff is definitely deeply embedded!

Now I’ve learnt how to play a 12 bar blues along with the bendy record, and hopefully figured out how to tune up along the way, it is over the page and onto “Basics” (pp. 12-14).

This book uses tab for the rest of the way through and that is the main basic it introduces here. It says “Playing tablature is an old and honorable tradition. Even as far back as the 15th century, organ music was commonly notated in tablature. In the 16th century, almost all lute music was scored in tablature. The immense popularity of tablature in the past can be accorded to one primary reason: that reading music from tablature is easy.” I’m not sure organ tab is that easy to read (see Wikipedia’s example!) but it is a compact way to show where to put your fingers and I can see the value as a starting point. I’m glad though that I quickly got involved in additional musical activities that meant I had to begin to pickup standard notation as well. I count not even mentioning regular dots as a mark against this book.

Over the page, we have the 12 bar blues from the first section written out again in tablature. That is a neat move because it takes something already familiar and uses it to step towards the next section, which will be introducing us to riffs. It also encourages the player to “keep your eyes on the page, not on your right hand” (we’re still just on open strings at this point). I’d say that is a good habit to cultivate early on.

However, there is one more questionable statement to come: “Although the length of the blues progression varied originally from 8 to 16 bars, it has become fixed by today’s rock players at 12 bars.” Really? Perhaps they’d never heard Clapton’s take on “Key to the Highway” (eight bars, released in 1970) or numerous other examples? Better perhaps to say “if someone suggests jamming on a blues, they probably mean one of a small number of variations on a 12 bar pattern unless they say otherwise”. Fortunately, I soon started playing with my Dad, who had a wide knowledge of traditional blues styles and who would have me following patterns that might last from anywhere from 7.5 to 18 or more bars long, with a reliance on listening and following the song!

Gripes aside, we can now not only play a simple blues in A but also write it down in a fashion which is good enough for our present needs as a beginner so, with a bit more practise under our belt, we can prepare to move on.

First stop – who were the authors? I can’t find out anything for certain about them although I note that Harvey Vinson also wrote books in the same series on lead and rhythm guitar (which my Dad later added into his collection) so it’s possible he was more of an all-round guitarist and Jim Gregory was more of a bass specialist. Vinson also wrote a number of other guitar orientated books.

I’ve turned up references to Bass Guitar being first published in 1973, making it even more unlikely that web searching will give me much more about the authors. If anyone does have more information, I’m curious but, for now, can proceed by judging the content rather than the authorship! They must have known something about bass playing because they did help set me on my own journey.

Let’s have a quick look at the introduction, which includes the sentence: “The electric bass, as we now know it, has been in existence for only two decades”! That backs up the 1973 date and also puts things in perspective. With the first P bass coming out in 1951, I’ve now got more playing history after the point I started on the instrument than had passed when I first picked up this book! Opposite the introduction is a full page black and white photo of Felix Pappalardi (bassist with Mountain but with a longer set of credits as a producer until his untimely death in 1983) and it is one of the memorable things about this tome – no colour inside but some wonderful pictures to capture that twenty year history (and, for some reason, one of Charles Mingus on upright bass on p.18).

Flicking over the page, there’s a page about getting started, faced by a photo (uncredited) of someone sitting down playing a P bass. Perhaps one of the authors? The advice is to sit down to practice: “Cross your legs and rest the rounded indentation of the bass on your right thigh…”. I can only presume this was before left-handed bassists were invented? Of course, there had been plenty including somewhat famous figures such as Paul McCartney. I wonder how many subsequent books make the same assumption? As a right hander, it wasn’t a problem for me but I feel for those who prefer to lead with the left.

One of the things that dates this book is that it came with a flexible plastic record. That is long-lost and I’ve got a feeling I transferred it onto cassette tape (also lost). Over the page, the record comes into play as a tuning reference. I’m pretty sure I got my Dad’s help tuning for the first time, as the instructions are pretty skimpy. It doesn’t even tell you how turning the tuning pegs can make the strings tighter or looser or to be careful not to tighten the string too much!

After that, you are instructed to learn the names of the four open strings and to pluck them with the index or middle finger of the right hand (more anti-left bias) before the learning how to play a 12 bar blues progression in A (just using the E, A and D strings) and then playing it along with a track on the record. Instructional notes include making sure you are playing the right strings, being in tune and playing in time. And, like that, by the bottom of p.11, it is time for your first gig or at least, “if it sounds all right”, to go onto the next chapter.

Recently, I’ve been working back through the book that started my bass playing and posting my reflections on the forums of the Scotts Bass Lessons site. However, I don’t think you can get to the content unless you are a member of the site so, for the next few days, I’m going to reproduce the posts here.

Towards the end of 1986, I was in my mid-teens and just getting started on studying for the newly-minted GCSE exams. Music wasn’t one of the subjects I’d taken up and, although I was a fan of hard rock and heavy metal, my playing career had ended half a lifetime ago when, aged about 7, I’d tripped up on my way to school and broken my plastic recorder.

Just starting on a new period of study doesn’t sound like a sensible time to take up a new, highly-involved hobby! Possibly I was influenced by the fact my best friend (same school year) had started piano lessons at the start of term but I can pin down the catalyst point. My family had popped into a music shop in Gravesend, UK, a town we often visited for its markets and fishmongers. My youngest brother had been learning violin for a little while and needed some new strings. A lifelong bibliophile, I occupied myself by flicking through the bargain book section where I found Bass Guitar by Jim Gregory and Harvey Vinson (Amsco Publications, 1983).

Didn’t my Dad have a bass guitar? Yes, he did (a 1960s Hohner 500/3). If I bought the book with my saved pocket money, would he be happy for me to use it? Yes, he would. I’ve got a vague memory that it was marked down to £3, the best part of a month’s “income” but, even if it cost more, that was probably the single best investment I’ve ever made.

My plan is to dig back into this book, which I’ve still got. What did I learn from it? Did I make it all the way to the end? Would I recommend it to a beginner today? Almost 40 years on, it is time to find out!