help!! ive hit a brick wall - Art of Slap Bass

Participant

I am by no means an expert and dont claim to be but I would recommend learning to play more before throwing in slaps. Not sure where you are for your bass playing but going to assume you are very new to it, if not then most of the info below is pointless as you probably know it.

Work on stuff like your intonation, make sure your playing the note right and not sharp or flat as well as chords and patterns and stuff.

A good site for beginner stuff is http://www.studybass.com

There is a pretty good lesson on http://www.rockabillybass.com but it mainly just playing root-5th and showing some different chords and progressions.

studybass would be the place I recommend, they have a lot on basic music theory, chord patterns, some basic blues progressions, covers stuff like 7th chords.

I find working on stuff like that helps more than sitting there trying to learn it while trying to learn to slap at the same time.

The more I work on those things the easier I find it to just randomly throw in some slaps without even thinking about what I am doing.

You said you know a dozen chords? what kind of chords, once you know one type of chord you can play it anywhere.

When I started learning different chords I would practice one chord at a time and basically come up with 3 different finger patterns for it.

One using an open string as the root, one using first fret as the root, and then a 3rd one to play anywhere else (the pattern will be the same anywhere).

Ones I think are pretty essential for any type of music to learn would be major and minor chords, maj7th, min7th, and dom7 chords.

Another thing that works well for any kind of music is using the same chords you know already but play them differently, like if your walking on a chord dont always do the walk starting on the root to the next root, change it up a bit and try playing the same chord but start it on the higher root note and walk back to the low one. Not the best way of explaining it but say your playing a G7 chord, it would be G-B-D-F, not sure how much music theory you know but g7 would be the root-3rd-5th-flat 7.

So you would normally play it the G on the E string, B on the A string, D on the A string, F on the D string and then if you were walking you would play the root again but on the D string and then play the same notes back to the one just before the original G you played so the B.

You can do the opposite as well and start on the high root and walk to the low root then back to the high one.

Playing something like that you can just randomly switch between them on different chords and play some using a low root and some starting on the high one. very noticable sound difference.

another thing I like doing for a lot of country is to use the lower flat 7th note of the chord.

So for a kind of country gallopy beat I would play say the C chord in this case and just keep alternating between C and the low 5th so that would be the G on the E string, then when I am going to change to the next chord I would end on the C again (the root) and then play a quick 5th then flat 7th using the low ones. the lower flat 7th will always be 2 half steps before the root you are on (2 frets if you know electric).

tab wise would be something like this.

———————————————
———————————————
—3—3—3—3—–1—————————-
—–3—3—3—–3—————————–

then move on to the next chord and just gives you a nice transition instead of switching directly to the chord.

Anyways hopefully something there is usefull for you and on the reverse hopefully it atleast makes a bit of sense.

I have no idea how beginner/intermediate you are so if it doesnt make sense let me know and I can break it down into something easier to understand.

as for tabs theres a few places depending what kind of music you are into, for more mainstream stuff just google usually works fine, 911tabs.com usually has most stuff.

There are some on http://www.rockabillybass.com but most of them just show the chords not actual tabs.

for some psychobilly you can find a few at http://www.wreckingpit.com

also google for psychobilly online retard krew (PORK), its a psycho forum and in the music section there is a page with like 40-50 pages of random guitar and bass tabs that people post.

anyways, cheers