Slap Hand Position

Now, with the slap playing, I do my own kind of hybrid version of it in the way that I hold my hands, because I wanted to find, I'm all about hand efficiency, as you've probably noticed. I try to, everything, it doesn't have to be there to get the sound out, you know, I get rid of, because I consider that wasted energy. But you have many different stylists in this field of slap playing. You know, like guys like Victor Wooten, who've come up with, you know, double thumbing techniques, and then you got Marcus Miller's style, you got the Larry Graham, the old school kind of, you know, stuff, to where the hands work differently with these different styles. So I wanted to come up with a technique that would incorporate everybody's stuff into one thing, with a minimal amount of excess motion. So I kind of came up with my own hybrid version of slap to make this happen. Now, the first thing is to get control of the thumb. All right, now, form-wise, now I have some slap videos, some links to some slap videos, I'm going to send to you. Okay, all right, slap videos. But cool. I start off with, first of all, I keep my arm off the bass. This is a really big thing for me, but it's also uncomfortable for a lot of people at first, because it puts all the work on the shoulder. So you might find your shoulder getting fatigued a little bit, you know, as you work on this stuff initially. So as you feel this stuff happening, I line up the joint of my thumb to the tip of the thumb, like it's straight, like a straight line, and then I line that up with the string, okay. All right, so that my hand, now there's going to be more to this, but my hand will work this way, it'll move this way on the strings, as opposed to letting the, you don't want the thumb to change angles and move this way. So, you know, this will help avoid hitting strings that you don't want to hit. Now, for most of this stuff, especially technique stuff, I'll work on the bottom four of this bass, because my right hand will do the same thing as yours will on a four-string. It'll sound different, but it'll work the same way. All right, now you want to have your line of attack basically be in a straight line like this, the actual contact point of the thumb with a string. You don't want it to vary this way or this way as you go up and down the strings. And usually right outside the fingerboard, you know, like what would be the next fret if your neck were extended, don't hit on the frets, but hit just on the outside of them. You get better tone this way, okay. Now, another thing, as we do lessons and stuff, you're going to see a lot of people say completely opposite things than what I say, and it's important to look at different points of view. But, you know, some people say, well, no, you're supposed to slap here, because the slap sound actually comes from striking the string and the string going against the fret, producing that click, you know, sound to the tone. It's easier to do hitting on the fretboard, but I found I lose some lowness, part of the sound, you know, the low fundamental part of the note goes away, so it deepens up as I get back just a little bit, and I like the tone there. But, so, I guess what the point I want to make here is that if you find something that works better for you from another point of view, please, I have no problem with you saying, you know what, I want to do it this way. Okay, because there's no one way to do anything here. So get as many different points of view as you can possibly stand to get, and then, you know, pick from this and this and let it come through you in the natural way, you know, it's going to be your playing. Okay, okay, all right. But anyway, getting back to this, so that my hand will move in a straight line this way. Now, I'm incorporating what's called the double thumb technique, made popular by this bass player named Victor Wooten, to where you use the tip of the thumb basically like a pick. So if I were playing with a pick, you know, just using the tip of the pick, I'm using the tip of my thumb like that. That's how he gets so many notes in there. Yeah, he's reducing the down-up motion of the notes, or down-up motion of the hand. So he's getting more with one down-up motion, he can get more notes, because if you combine that with the left-hand stuff, like doing hammer-ons and pull-offs, with one down-up motion I can get four notes, one, two, three, four. So when you start some speed behind that, that's where all that fast stuff comes from, is half of it's in the left hand. So slap playing is really kind of an illusion, because people will be looking at your right hand seeing all these notes fly out, not realizing that half of them are coming from the left too. Ah, I see, I see. But anyway, because of this technique, I angle my thumb up. So if this were the string, right, and I was laying my thumb flat against the string, I angle up at the wrist, so that I come down, my contact point is going to be on the tip of the thumb, right here on this part, as opposed to the side of the thumb and standard slap playing. So this way I can go from a standard slap, just hitting, letting the thumb hit the string and bounce off, I don't have to change my hand to go from that to the double thumb technique. Basically my hand stays pretty much the same. So that's a point about angling up this way, and it's not so much from the elbow, or from the joint of the arm, or the elbow, it's really kind of more a little more in the wrist here. The wrist, the wrist just kind of comes up a little bit.