Getting a more funky/smooth feel

[Annoying Twit]

If I was a logical, organised, person I believe that I would have aced this by now. What seems to have been revealing itself is that I was overconfident in my timing because I was able to ape other people's timing. Now that I'm finally getting around to really getting deeper into Friedland's book, I'm exposing defects in my timing that I didn't even know were there. E.g. if I'm playing the classic syncopated pattern with two notes played on the downbeat, and only a single syncopated note on the remaining three beats of the bar, then I'm not being accurate enough to distinguish between these unless there is a very clear pattern (playing along with bass or a clear drum beat) to follow.

E.g. in eighths, the pattern to play (capitals indicates which divisions are played - meaningless syllables used as per Friedland's style) is:

DA BA da BA da BA da BA - easy, even if unaccompanied

For shuffle twelfths, it's

DA chi BA da chi BA da chi BA da chi BA - in this, I can get the downbeat right, but I don't think the other notes are accurately timed unless I'm playing to a very slow tempo and counting.

For beats divided into sixteenth notes, it's:

DIG a chick A dig a chick A dig a chick A dig a chick A - again, I can only do this with a slow tempo and counting. If I drop the counting and don't have a pattern to play to my timing will wander as I drift towards the straight eighths timing. Even worse for sixteenths than for twelfths.

Also, for the more complicated patterns that he includes in the book, it takes time for me to lock into the correct rhythm, unless I play along with the example. I can get them even unaccompanied by starting slow and counting, and eventually building up to unaccompanied and not counting, but this is still far from trivial for me.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for this, and that I'm making progress. But, it's a tiny bit frustrating that I'm not as good a bassist as I thought I was, and that I'm not doing some quite basic things well enough. Also, that I could have thrown myself deeply into Friedland's book in August when I bought it - but sadly that's me all over. (See username for explanation).

Edited February 10, 2014 by Annoying Twit

[iconic]

Its tough isnt it....i thought i had an ok funky feel until i sold a bass to fellow basschatter andybassdoyle....even after only watching 30 seconds of his playing unplugged i thought what a sublime funky stacato type technique that means a great player can make one note seem like a song.

Made me think.

[iconic]

Been tagged many times on here but this is what i meant by my above post....simple can be sooooo funky
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IHE6hZU72A4#

[gjones]

I think Louis Armstrong once said something along the lines of, 'if you need me to explain how to swing, you'll never be able to swing'.

Swing and funk is all about playing behind and in front of the beat. A lot of great bassists and drummers don't even know they're doing it.

A typical one bar funk riff, will start behind the beat at the beginning of the bar, and then have to get ahead of the beat at the end of the bar so it can finish before the 'one' of the next bar. Listen to the bass riff in James Brown sex machine which is a typical example.

[chris_b]

Swing and Funk isn't about playing anything anywhere. The notes will come but it's about [i]feeling[/i] the groove and good timing. Louis Armstrong was right, but also include trying to deconstruct the groove in order to find out where it comes from (like the Golden Goose story). That won't tell you how to [i]feel[/i] what you're playing.

Imagine most playing as a saw-tooth. Now you have to take that and make it the smoothest, straightest, most flowing bass line you can imagine.

[Annoying Twit]

I personally believe that it's a case of being able to follow the rules before you can break them properly. I can get some things sounding OK timewise, but not everything. First I need to be able to play something easily without interpretation and subtle timing variations. Then I can bring an as yet limited amount of funk to it. So I don't think that I'm constitutionally incapable of achieving good timing, but I will have to work at it.

That very good players are perhaps not even aware of how they are playing in these ways is not actually surprising, as research into true human expertise that what distinguishes a true expert from a 'proficient performer' is that for a true expert, much of the knowledge that they apply in their tasks will have receded into unconsciousness. But that doesn't mean that they didn't specifically study and apply that knowledge earlier on when they were learners. Here's a reasonable discussion of expertise, which I believe makes some points relevant to this discussion. http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

Another area that some people claim cannot be learnt is songwriting. But as a Beatles fan, one insight that we have about The Beatles is the degree to which they developed as songwriters, as recordings of them as early teenagers is available. E.g. this is one of the first songs that John Lennon wrote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cHcc-edjMM

And it's a historical oddity, but I wouldn't call it a great song.

The playing skill of that era is also illuminating (and more relevant to this thread). They got better over time. There are people who just sit down and can do something first time out (Brian Wilson wrote Surfer Girl as an experiment to see if he could write a song). But I don't accept these comments that 'if you haven't got it already, you can't learn it.'

Edited March 24, 2014 by icastle
Link fixed.