How to Hold and Finger Your Bass - Part One

Percy White: Hi, welcome back. My name is Percy and this is another part of the series on playing bass. In this segment, I am going to show you how to actually make notes on your bass. Now, first thing you have to do is be comfortable holding your instrument and I have straps on because this is very heavy bass, but if you are going to be standing up, you would be seeing down you need to adjust the bass so it fits comfortably and you feel relaxed when you are playing. You have to hold your bass, there is a better way of holding, I dont want to say right or wrong because you have to be comfortable, but they are the traditional ways if you will. Traditional way is for your left hand or for whatever hand is holding the bass because you maybe left-handed which means right hand will hold it, but for whichever hand thats holding the neck of the bass which is this part, if you are holding the neck, ideally you want to place your thumb behind the neck of the bass, so you cant really see it and that gives you a pivot point for your hand. So, it is around the bass and you can pivot off of your thumb. Ideally you would like to keep your middle finger of the hand that is making the notes, you want to keep that as close to the thumb as possible and so if my thumb is here on this fret here then I want my bring my finger around, some little fingers right there too. So, if you want to try and keep your thumb behind the bass and keep it around the position of your middle finger as you move up to neck that might not be as easy to do but around at the first five frets or so it should not be that hard to do. So, thats how you hold the bass and I am going to show you this.

When you doing it, if you know this my hand, this part of my hand does not rest on the neck, its extended away from the neck and I will show it to you so you can see, so even when I am reaching around, this part of my hand doesnt touch the bass, you want to have space there, that allows you to have maximum dexterity when you are playing. So, well get to other things that affect your dexterity, but thats an important part. So, you have your neck hand which is right here and then you have your strumming hand. Now, you want to make the notes as cleanly as possible, clean is nice, speed in wonderful and speed will come, but you want to be clean when you playing the bass and thats where your right hand comes in or whatever hand you strum the strings with. Now, what I do is, I like to mute the strings that I am not playing and there is a technique for doing that. You can rest your thumb across the string that you arent playing with and the other fingers will strum the other strings and I will get into that. First, what you do is primarily you want to use these two fingers, you want to alternate these two fingers at all the times and how you making a note is, I am going to start here on the highest string. What you would do is you strum your fingers across the string like so, and you let the string behind it stop your hand. Notice that I am not plucking at it like this. What I am doing is, I am taking the middle finger and I am just running it across the string. What makes the sound is that the pickups will pickup the vibration of the string.