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Bass Guitar Beginnings

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The bass has always played an important role in the music of yesterday and most modern music today. No matter what the instrument is, a bass line is usually always represented in some form or another, from the lower instruments of an orchestra, to the bass notes played by a solo acoustic guitarist, the bass line serves as the foundation and root for the music. Music would sound hollow and incomplete without a driving bass line. With the advent of jazz, blues and then rock and roll, a different type of instrument was needed to play a strong bass line. This is when the bass guitar came into play.

Bass guitars have been around since the 1930’s though not quite in the exact same form as the Fender bass guitars that we know today, but you could say that their predecessors, the acoustic Basses, have been around for many years longer.

The bass guitar was different from the bass that everyone had been familiar with for many years though. Instead of playing it vertically and either plucking the strings or pulling a bow across the strings, the bass guitar is played just like a regular guitar and is held horizontally.

From a distance, the electric bass guitar could easily be mistaken for an electric guitar as the both look very similar with the same solid body shape, however the bass usually has a longer neck. Also, unlike an acoustic guitar which is hollow, with a sound hole to allow for amplification, the sound of a Fender bass guitar is amplified by plugging it in to an amplifier and speaker.

With four strings tuned in 4ths just like the four lowest strings of a regular guitar except tuned an octave lower, the bass guitar is similar to the guitar and guitarist sometimes play bass and vice versa. While guitars are primarily strummed and picked, the bass can be played with a variety of techniques as well including, fingering, picking, slapping,thumb play, muting thumping and more. Because of it’s close relationship to the drums and the pulse of the music, the bass guitar is considered to be a rhythm section instrument.





Guitar Techniques

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While the importance of a decent song to play on the guitar cannot be underestimated, the technique employed when playing it can totally determine how that song will sound. 

Just playing the all the right notes in the right order at the right time is like music by numbers. Guitar playing is as much about variety as it is skill, and its important to get a feel for how certain notes can be played in the context of your song, even if its not by the book. Most of these types of techniques get labeled as “lead guitar techniques,” but the truth is that every guitarist should have these as part of their repertoire.

There isn’t one technique mentioned here that can’t be found in a rhythm part in a number of different songs.  So these techniques should be mastered even if you only play rhythm guitar in a band.

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Hammer-ons and pull-offs are very similar techniques. If you want to play two or more notes on the same string, rather than fretting and picking each one individually, the guitarist literally sounds each note with their fretting hand and skips picking the note each time. The Hammer on comes into play when the note is higher up the string and the guitarist must fret the note with sufficient force to produce the appropriate note.

The opposite of this is pull-offs, which are used to move back to a lower note. Before doing a pull-off, the new note must already be fretted. The name is a misnomer, you don’t simply pull off the note, you actually pluck the string with the fretting hand as you pull your finger away in order to sound the note. Hammer ons and Pull-offs are best used when you have a fast sequence of notes all of which are close together.

Bending

Bending literally involves pushing a ringing string along a fret to change the pitch.  A great bend will allow for easy movement between notes and uses changes in string tension to produce the sound. This movement through the micro-tones of two notes can be very effective in slow bends. You can also unbend a string back to the original note for the opposite effect. This is very popular technique with a lot of lead and rhythm riffs making use of it.

However, this technique can be difficult to learn. You need to pay attention to the pitch of the note while performing the bend.  If you don’t hit it exactly, then the note will either sound flat or sharp depending on if you under or over bend the string. This can be a more frustrating technique to first learn, but it really makes a huge difference in your playing, and you will be very glad for the effort you put into it once you actually learn to bend the string properly.

A Beginners Guide to Guitar Effects

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What makes Jimi Hendrix’s sound easily recognizable from Carlos Santana? How can you easily tell metal from funk, even if let’s say the metal player and the funk player are playing the same song (very unlikely, but bear with me here)? The answer: guitarists use effects to color their sound and give it a kind of modification suited to the type of music involved.

Normally these effects can be housed separately in small effects pedals, or in multi-effects hardware, or built into amplifiers, or simulated in computer software. They can be used singly, or you can turn on a combination of effects to get a particular sound. We will identify the different types of guitar effects so you can choose the one that is perfect for creating the sound you want.

Distortion effects are popular in genres like rock, metal, etc. This is what produces the heavy, rough, raw sound you hear in these genres. Distortion effects can be divided into categories like overdrive/distortion (this is the well-known rough sound), fuzz (which is used to copy the sound of a vibrating torn speaker – thus being “fuzzy”), and high-gain (the thick, loud, “chugging” sound used in heavy metal). Almost all rock bands have these as a given, and is a good, basic investment.

Filtering effects are effects which shape the sound by enhancing or minimizing certain frequencies. Here you can find equalizers (similar to how normal equalizers work), and wahs (a foot-operated pedal that lets through increasingly higher or lower frequencies by rocking the pedal). The wah pedal got its name because it emulates a person saying a long “wah” when played (the low frequencies are the “w-“ and the high frequencies are the “-ah” part). You can hear this mostly in funky grooves.

Volume effects are just that, they modify the volume in different ways. Examples of these are volume pedals (these are just volume knobs in the shape of a pedal which you can rock back and forth), tremolos (which is used to copy the sound of a volume knob being turned up and down quickly, making the tone “fluctuate”), and compressors (used to preserve a certain volume level as the signal gets louder).

Time-based effects take a sound signal and copy it, making a kind of echoing sound. Delay pedals can change the delay time between the original sound and the copied sound, up to very long delay times, making a rolling echo-like sound (a notable user of delay effects is U2’s The Edge). Reverb pedals, however, copy the sound produced in a large space, where little echoes pile up and decay quickly. Aside from distortion effects, these are also popular, and may be an essential part of your setup.

Modulation effects are effects which actually change how the sound sounds. Examples of these are phase shifters (which makes a sort of whooshing sound by copying the original signal and then putting it out of phase regularly), flangers (which create a kind of speeding-up or slowing-down sound), chorus pedals (copying the sound of several guitarists playing at the same time), and rotary speakers (copying the sound of a signal going through spinning speakers, making a kind of wavy pitch-changing effect). These types of effects are used to create those experimental, space-age-sounds.

Pitch shifters change the pitch of a signal, then combines it with the original sound so that it sounds like two guitars blending together in harmony. It can even be used as a bass guitar if you set it one octave lower than normal, or produce a video-gamey sound if set one octave higher.

You can experiment with several combinations of pedals and connect them in chains to figure out what type of sound you want to create. After some time you can hear which effects were used in your favorite songs, and hopefully this article can assist you on the road to creating your own sound, and adding new layers to your musical adventure.

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