Slap is a technique, not a style — you can play funk with a pick or fingers just as easily. It's another way to get notes out, with a percussive, drum-like quality. The question is how to organize the right hand so every motion earns its keep. For Russ, the double-thumb angle is the constraint everything else works around. Get that angle right and your regular thumb, your pops, and your hand position all fall in line.
Slap is a technique, not a style
Funk is what slap is most associated with, but funk doesn't require slap — you can play it with a pick or fingers, any which way. Slap is just another technique on the bass, one with a heavy percussive flavor — often more rhythmic than harmonic, closer to playing drums than to traditional bass lines.
The payoff of that framing is practical: the goal becomes efficiency and hand economy, same as fingerstyle. Everything doesn't have to be there to get the note out. Anything extra is a waste of energy.
Hand angle is the constraint
Start with the thumb. Russ thinks of his thumb as a drumstick sticking out of his hand, keeps it as straight as he can, and lines it up with the string. The hand moves across the strings in the direction of the thumb's length — not rotating around it. If the arm moves the wrong way, you can't get the thumb in there for the upstroke of the double thumb, and the whole thing falls apart.
The other half of the setup is keeping the arm off the bass. The strap should do the work — your hands come off the instrument freely without anything shifting. If you let go and the bass moves, you're using hand energy to hold it up. Resting your forearm on the body is comfortable, but it interferes with mobility and puts pressure on the veins enough that fingers can go numb. If taking the arm all the way off feels like too much, at least reduce the pressure. Expect some shoulder fatigue while you adapt.
The thumb: single strike, double thumb, and tone balance
The regular thumb strike is a flick of the wrist — almost like you throw the thumb into the string and let it bounce off. Thinner strings give up a sound more reluctantly, so you might swipe a little for more tone there, but the motion stays small and fast.
For the double thumb, the framing is simple: you're using the tip of your thumb like a pick. That's what lets one down-up motion give you two notes, and it's the only way the upstroke works cleanly. Because there's only one hand angle that supports that upstroke, Russ lets it dictate everything else. The regular thumb and the pops both operate from the same position — the striking surface is smaller (right on the corner of the thumb), but he never has to reset his hand between techniques.
For tone, aim for a click plus a good regular note balancing together — that's what makes slap sound like slap. The striking zone is roughly at the end of the fingerboard. Avoid sitting right over the 12-fret harmonic — it eats the low end and the note thins out. Move a hair past the fingerboard and the low fundamental comes back. The double thumb has a gristlier, rattlier character — easier to move around, but a different sound. The goal is to combine the two fluidly.
Popping: keep the thumb angle sacred
The instinct when popping is to rotate the hand so the finger pulls the string like regular fingerstyle. The problem is what that does to the thumb — the angle tips down, no longer parallel with the strings, and the double-thumb upstroke isn't available to you anymore.
Popping has to follow the same rule as everything else: the thumb angle is king. That means popping on the sides of the top of the fingers rather than pulling with the pads. Be careful at first — a steel string against a new spot on your finger can raise a blister in minutes. Finger versus steel string, the string wins.
Why it takes time to internalize
Once the angle is set, the combinations stack up fast. One down-up motion is already four notes. Add a hammer-on and it's five. Add a pull-off and the math keeps going. Between regular thumb, down-up thumb, pop one, pop two, hammer-ons, and pull-offs, there's far more to coordinate than in fingerstyle — the mathematics are so much more complex.
That's why slap takes longer to internalize. The goal isn't just to execute each piece; it's to get your hands to the point where you don't have to think about any of them. As Russ puts it, "music's a language and it really needs to be treated like one." The instrument is like your vocal cords — when you talk, you don't think about how your mouth moves or how a word is spelled. You just speak. That's where you want your bass playing to land. Give yourself the time, and keep reducing excess motion.
Key takeaways
- Slap is a technique, not a style — another way to get notes out, with a drum-like quality.
- Let the double-thumb angle be king. Regular thumb, pops, and hand position all organize around it.
- Keep the arm off the bass — let the strap carry the weight so the hands are free.
- Aim for click plus good regular note balance. Strike just past the fingerboard, not over the 12-fret harmonic.
- Slap takes time. The combinations stack up quickly; the goal is to stop thinking about them.
Slap technique lives in the fundamentals I teach. For the short-form version of the hand position that opens this post, see slap hand position; for more on how double thumb and regular thumb operate from the same angle, see more slap basics. If you'd like personalized feedback on your thumb angle, pops, and economy of motion, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
Read the transcript
Slap bass playing is a technique on the bass. It's not really a style. I think that's the first thing to get — the style that's associated with it is funk more than any other, but it's really just a technique on the bass, because you can play funk with a pick, you can play it with your fingers, any which way you come up with. So it's not really a style. The technique itself is basically a lot like playing drums — there's a percussive aspect to it where it's rhythmic. A lot of it can be more rhythmic than harmonic.
Now what I do with my slap playing — and it's still a work in progress — is that I combine the newer techniques. Like, Victor Wooten came out with his stuff utilizing the double-thumb technique, and I wanted to have a technique on the instrument where I can incorporate everybody's stuff, rather than just the standard. Combine the double-thumb techniques, get all the speed happening with that.
Right now I'm really big on efficiency and hand economy. Everything doesn't have to be there to get the note out. I like to weed out, because I feel like it's a waste of energy. So I like to keep my hand in one position.
In researching this, I found there's really only one way to do the double thumb, because basically the double-thumb technique is simply using the tip of your thumb like a pick. It reduces the amount of down-up motion of the hand, so you get more notes with less effort. Since that's the only way to get the double thumb happening with this hand angle, I decided everything else had to work around it. My regular thumb, my pops, everything would work with this hand in this position. It's a little bit more difficult because I've reduced the surface area where I actually strike the string — it's right here on the corner of my thumb.
In your slap playing, basically you want two things in your sound. Getting a sound going is really important first. You want the click plus good regular note balance — those two elements, so that you have a good tone.
The first thing I recommend people work on is getting the hand form together. Where I start with this is that I think of my thumb as like a drumstick sticking out of my hand, and I keep that as straight as I can. Then I line that up with a string, so my hand moves this way.
I like to keep my arm off the bass. Just about any technique that I play, keeping my hands off the instrument, letting the strap do all the work, so that when I'm playing — even if it's slap stuff — my hands come off the instrument. Nothing's holding anything, the strap's doing everything. I'm not leaning against anything, which I feel is real important. It frees up the hands to do a lot of different stuff.
If you're playing and you let go of the instrument and it moves, then you're actually using hand energy to hold the instrument. Weeding that out — a good way to check is play something, then take your hands off real quick. If the instrument moves, you've got an issue with that. A lot of people like to rest their arm on the instrument — it's a very comfortable thing to do, to rest the weight of their arm there — but it interferes with mobility on the strings. More importantly, you're putting pressure on these veins, taking blood out of the hand. I've seen people play like this and wonder why their fingers are going numb. So keeping your arms off the instrument is a really good thing to do. It takes a little getting used to — if you've been doing it the other way, you'll find your shoulder getting fatigued pretty quickly, and it takes a little time to adapt to it. But it really pays off. If you don't want to take it all the way off, then just reduce the pressure is probably a good idea.
When I'm moving from string to string, I line up the joint of the thumb with the tip of the thumb — I move this way. The arm is moving this way, as opposed to letting it move that way, because the more you go that way, you're not able to get the thumb in there for the up part of the double-thumb technique. It's not going to work. The hand has to be down here.
When I do my regular thumb — getting back to just getting a good tone with a regular bounce thumb — it's just like a flick of the wrist. It's almost like you throw your thumb into the string and it bounces off. You find the thinner strings harder to get a sound out of sometimes — you might swipe it a little bit, get a little bit more tone on the thinner strings.
Probably right at the end of the fingerboard is a good place to shoot for. What I would not recommend is right over the 12-fret harmonic, because of that harmonic you lose some low end. Right over there you're getting kind of that happening. Listen to the difference — it thickens up as I move a little bit this way. A little bit of the low fundamental comes back into the sound. Just outside the fingerboard, if you have a two-octave neck, is a good place to do it.
You'll notice that the double thumb has more of a gristly sound to it, a lot of rattle going on, but it's easier to move around. You can get more notes with less effort. So I want to combine the regular thumb with the double thumb.
With popping — you would probably want to pop like you play regularly, with the same kind of finger angle that you go this way. The problem with that is, see what it does to the thumb? Now the thumb angle is pointing down, as opposed to being parallel with the strings. Again, I look at the double-thumb angle as being king here, and everything else follows that. So this is going to mean that I'm going to pop on the top of the sides of the fingers here.
If you do this and you're not used to it, be real careful, because you can raise a blister in a matter of minutes. You got the finger versus a steel string — the steel string is going to win. But I keep that same angle.
So I combine all those things together. Basically one down-up motion of the hand, I've got four notes. If I had a hammer-on, there's five. With a pull-off, you can — the math gets pretty complex. And that's one thing about the slap technique that you have to realize: it's going to take some time, because the mathematics are so much more complex. You have the regular thumb, the down-up thumb, pop one, pop two, hammer-ons, and pull-offs. To get your hands to where you don't have to think about it — because music's a language and it really needs to be treated like one, in the sense that the instrument is like your vocal cords. When you talk to somebody, how much do you think about the way your mouth moves, or any of this operates? When you talk, you don't. That's the way you want the bass to be.
For those of you who've experienced playing with the fingers, you don't have to really think about it. I'm just hearing and playing. I'm not really thinking about anything, any more than you think about how a word is spelled when you talk to somebody, or how your mouth is moving, or anything like that.
The point with the slap thing is you've got to give yourself some time for it to adapt. It's not going to come quickly, because there's so many things to internalize where you don't have to think — where you're actually hearing the ideas. My hands aren't really — I'm not thinking about how to do this. I've done it enough now to where it's starting to just — I hear, and my hands know where to go. And that's just a lot of hours. But reducing all this excess motion is going to be a real important part of it.
