Originally published June 7, 2013, lightly edited for clarity.
As with all the techniques I use in my bass playing, I work to organize my right hand slap form to operate with as little excess motion as possible. To do this as I change from a standard thumb position to a double thumb position, I basically let the double thumb position be the constant that everything else works around. This is because the double thumb technique needs the right hand thumb to be at certain angle to the string to get an effective upstroke. It’s a little more difficult for developing the standard thumb technique, but the advantages of both working together have made it worth it for me. I lay out how the regular thumb, pops, and hand position all organize around that angle in slap bass technique fundamentals. The following video shows how these positions work together. Slap is one of the styles I teach. For coaching on your slap technique, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
Read the transcript
All right, now this is going to feel really awkward and strange at first. So one thing about the slap thing is you're going to have to be patient with this, because it's not an easy technique to get going, because there's so much math involved in the different ways that the hands work on the instrument. But the first thing to do is to get control of the thumb. Don't worry about the double thumb yet, but I talk about the double thumb just to explain the reason I'm holding my hand in the way that I do. Okay. All right, so getting the hand, let's say, in the double thumb position. Now go ahead and strike the strings a little bit closer to the frets, like right over that pickup, right about there. Yeah, that should probably be where I would go for now.
When you do the slap part, it's like, you know, if you just flicked your wrist, just a real loose kind of thing. That's really kind of like the best way to describe the motion. You don't drive the thumb into the string, it's almost like you throw it into the string and it bounces off. Yeah. So there's kind of like a reckless abandon here, to a degree, but it's controlled, right? So it's just a real quick flicking motion of the thumb.
All right, so now you want two things in your slap sound. If I just laid my fingers flat over the fingerboard, you want a click kind of sound plus a regular note. Now go ahead and work on third fret notes here, as opposed to open strings, it'll be a little easier to control for now. So that I have my fingered note plus a click, combine the two, balance and combine the two, your slap thing on the E string, on the G notes on the third fret of the E string. Okay. Well, I'll give you an example, that you could just do quarter notes and actually kind of work with a groove and make it a little more fun than just exercising it. Cool. So you can work on like a quarter note thing like that, and then eighth notes, right? So you could put on that as well, as exercise, you could, with a third fret note on your E string, just work on keeping a quarter note groove and then an eighth note groove.
Okay, now when you're doing, you're holding your thumb like you were showing me, how are you doing the rest of your fingers? Keep those curled in like this, not balled up like a fist, tight, but just relaxed, curled like that. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's funny, it's really hard, like I keep missing. Yeah, you will for a little while, until you kind of get the aiming comfortable. It'll just take a little time, but it'll happen. Okay. Now, I'm also going to send some slap exercises that we'll be working on too, so you'll be getting a PDF file of those.
Okay, man, you got this system down, this is really great, the way you do these lessons. Yeah, I mean, it's just basically having done it so long, I've organized material and methods, you know, that, you know, I do this, now do this, and I do this, now do this, you know. But the downside to that is that you have to be very thorough with a lot of these tedious steps, and so a lot of it's going to be like, man, this is not a lot of fun to do, you know what I mean? I'm the first one to admit that some of these things that we might get into aren't going to be the most exciting things you've done with the instrument. It's a lot more fun to put on that track and just go, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's important to balance and do that too, you know. You shouldn't just do all one way or the other, right? But some of it's a little tedious, and it takes some time, it'll tax your patience a little bit, but you just keep going, I promise you'll get better. Okay.
All right, so with the slap, go ahead and really let the main focus be on the quality of just the regular, I call it the bounce thumb, to where you just come down on the string and it bounces off. Don't worry about the double thumb yet, other than to maybe check the way you hold your hand and to angle it up. Okay? Right. Can you see this, is this clear? Yeah. All right, so you see how my thumb's lying flat on the string? Yes. You don't want to play this way. What you do is you angle up at the wrist, so that when you come down on the string, you come down like this. Oh, okay, I see. Okay, that makes it actually a little easier. Yeah, but also it's less surface area, though, so aiming wise it's a little bit more challenging, because you've got less of a surface area to actually go for hitting the string. So you might find yourself missing more this way initially. Oh, I see. That does actually help, what you just showed me. Okay, so now I'm starting to get the pointing up thing that you were saying with the thumb. Yeah. Remember, it's a very relaxed kind of wrist flick. You see the circle I drew on my thumb? Yeah. That's about where you're aiming to hit the string. Okay.
