Chords for Basic Slap Bass with Yonít Spiegelman

_ _ _ _ [D] _ [A] _ _ _
[G] _ _ _ [C] _ [D] _ _ _ _
_ [N] _ _ _ Hi, everybody.
My name is Jonit Spiegelman.
I'm a bass player, and I work around New York City.
I also [G] teach in lessonface.com.
I teach bass, guitar, and vocals.
Today I want to talk a little bit about basic slap on the bass guitar.
If you want, you can also go to the lessonface website.
We [N] have a link right down here, and you can go and actually see the exercise, the music
sheet of the exercise, and a drum track for 90 BPM that you can play with and practice
your basic slap.
Now, the first thing that we want to go through is the actual thumb slap.
Now, when you do the thumb slap, you want to make sure that your hand is kind of in a fist.
Make sure it's not open, because it just creates more stress on [B] your hand.
You want to make sure that it's kind of relaxed.
You don't really want to hit the strings and create energy and force on it.
You want to just use gravity and [C] sort of just punch it.
Now, when you punch it, make sure that it's on the end of the neck, because that's where
we can really [F] control [Bb] the frequencies.
You can hear that it sounds a little bit weirder right here.
[G] So you want to really make [A] sure [Ab] _ [B] _
[A] that you stay here.
You can go [F] through all of the strings, _ _ [G] [E] because one thing that you [B] really want to make sure
that you don't have is buzzing.
That's the main thing that we want to focus about when we play any [A] bass line.
When you hear [B] sort of a different string buzzing, it [Bb] kind of cuts the whole cleanliness of the bass line.
So we'll start [D] with the thumb.
[G] So after [A] you practice [C] it a little [D] bit on your different [N] string and try to make sure that
you really don't have any buzzing, you can go to the basic slap exercise that you have
on the link right here, and you can start with exercise A.
_ _ _ _ _ [D] _
_ _ _ [G] _ _ [Am] _ [D] _ _
_ _ [C] _ _ [B] _ _ _ _
[Bb] Make sure that you practice
it either with the drum track that you have right here or with the [Eb] metronome, because
[G] one of the most important things to do [N] when you start playing slap is really make sure
that you learn how to do it on time, [B] because it's very easy to get sucked into playing
a lot of notes [G] but without a sense of time, which will make it harder for you to play
with other people or to record in studios down the road.
The next thing that we want to learn is the pop.
Now, the pop, you do it with your [Bb] index finger.
We do it a lot in the G string, _
_ [F] _ _ [C] _ _ but of course, in [Em] every string.
[Bb] It usually comes as a reaction to the thumb, to the thumb slap.
So I [B] can do something [C] like an octave.
_ [D] _ _ [Am] _ [D] _
_ [Am] _ [Bb] _ [D] _ [E] Now another thing that we can do with the pop is that we can create ghost notes.
Now you [Ab] create ghost notes by [A] not actually [B] playing any of the notes, but kind of putting
your hand, [Gb] your left hand, [Bb] very gently on the neck so it makes kind of a choky sound.
It's very important because it's very rhythmic and it really helps us to make our baseline move.
[G] So for example, I can put it in the last sixteenth of the [Bb] bar and really create sort of a [B] movement
to take us to the next bar.
So _ you _ _ [Am] _ _
[Dm] _ _ [Ab] _ _ [D] _ _ [Am] _ [Eb]
can hear that it really makes some sort [Bm] of, it's like an accented _ sound that
really helps us create the sound of the slap.
[Ab] So what we're going to do right now is we're going to go to [N] exercise B on the music sheet
and we're going to practice our thumb slap together with our pop.
_ _ _ [Dm] _ [Am] _ _ [Dm] _
_ [Gm] _ _ [C] _ _ _ _ _
[G] _ _ _ _ [Dm] _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ _ [C] _ [B] Awesome.
So now we got down [Bm] the thumb slap and the pop and there's only one more thing that we
need to do to be able to practice the whole exercise together.
That one more thing is called hammer on.
Now it's not anything we do with our right hand, it's actually something that we do with
our left hand.
So [G] when you thumb slap, you can actually create another sound by just [B] hammering on another
note on your neck.
Usually, you will [Am] be a whole step above it.
[Dm] _ _ [G] _ Now it's another thing that you want to really make sure that you practice on time since
this is not something, this is [Em] not a sound that's being provided by your right hand,
[B] this is actually in the tech that's being provided by the left hand.
So you really want to make sure that it's [Em] on time.
[Am] _ [Dm] _ _ [G] _ [Bb] _
[C] _ _ _ [Dm] _ You can practice this with all of your string as well.
Now [B] another thing that we can do with the [Bb] hammer on is actually use our pop.
[C] _
[F] _ [G] _ [D] _ [B] _ [Am] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [D] _ _ _ [Am] _ _
_ _ [D] _ _ [E] _ _ [Em] And you can hear the difference with the sound.
[Bb] The pop one [Eb] gives us [G] much more of a punchy [C] kind of sound [Bm] and you can hear a lot of bass
players use it a lot, especially Marcus Miller is very famous with that kind of sound.
So you can basically [F] just practice it around [Bb] [Bm] on your neck.
Make sure that you feel really comfortable with it.
And then you can take the thumb slap, the pop, and the hammer on and we can play the
whole exercise from the music [N] sheet, the one that I was playing in the beginning of the video. _ _
_ [D] _ _ _ [D] _ _ _ [A] _
_ _ [D] _ [Cm] _ [D] _ _ [N] _ _
_ _ So now that you got the whole exercise down, it might be just two bars repeating themselves,
but you really want to make sure that you [G] have sort of a consistency while you're [Em] playing.
That's why the drum track is pretty long and you can just play that _ exercise a bunch of times.
Actually practice it so you can actually do it well each time that you play it.
It's something that is very important when you go and play slap bass with your band mates
or at the studio.
You really want to make sure that you have it down with the rhythm [G] and make sure that
all the notes pop out every time that you play the exercise.
_ [C] _ _ [D] _ [C] _ [D] _ [N] _ _ _ _ _