This week I’ve got a simple bass playing tip for you that should change how you control your bass tone. The key is to experiment with the position of your picking hand.
The tone of your bass guitar is all there in your hands. Moving only a fraction of an inch can change your tone in a huge way.
In this bass lesson we’ll look at the different tones we can find as we work down the bass strings with a simple bass riff.
Improve Your Tone
Below you can see the bassline used as the video example.
Reminds me of a demo I gave for students in an audio-related course. I made recordings of a guitar E string plucked near the bridge and near the 12th fret. I then used something called the Fourier transform to display the corresponding frequency spectra. In both cases, you see peaks at 110 Hz and multiples thereof. However, the distribution of amplitude among the peaks is quite different. Plucking near the 12th fret created peaks that tended to decrease in amplitude with increasing frequency. Plucking near the bridge gave more oomph to the higher harmonics. Bass should be similar, but the fundamental frequency of the bass E string is 55 Hz!