In this lesson I'm gonna give you five
funky slap grooves and these will help you to improve your slap technique and
also to have a bit of fun. If you need to learn the basic slap technique then I've
got another two lessons in this series and they concentrate on getting a good
sound with your thumb and with your pop. So you might want to look at those first
if you need to learn the technique. You can download a PDF with these five
exercises in notation or tab and you can get that by clicking the link below in
the description and I'll send those to you. Right we'll get straight on with the
exercises – Exercise One consists of a slap octave pattern. On the PDF I've
written a P above the note where I want you to do a pop and for all the rest of
the notes you use your thumb. We've got octave patterns in this exercise and
remember to get an octave, you play the root note, so we play a D fifth fret of
the A string, and to get the octave you go two strings higher and two frets
higher so……..
And that's the same for every note……. In the exercise we've got a bar of D, a bar of C, a bar of G, and a bar of D. We've got the
same pattern over each chord so over the D, I play it slowly…… and we just take
that pattern and play on the different chords. So the next bar will be C and then
G and then back up to D. Obviously start these exercises really slowly until
you're getting a really clean note and then you can speed them up. I'll leave the
drum patterns underneath these exercises running at the end of the video so
you'll get a chance to play through yourself. So you can try it this slowly
at first….. and then when you're happy…… you can speed up. By the way I'm playing this
lesson on a P bass and I really like that for slap, you can get that really
old-school slap sound.
But equally well slap is great on say a Music Man Stingray,
or jazz bass is a classic bass to use. If we move on to Exercise Two – again that uses octave patterns but we've got a slightly different rhythmic pattern here…….. we've
got two bars of A and then two bars of C and once you've got the first bar sorted
then it's the same pattern on all the bars.
So we've got two of A, two of C. So
first of all on an A…. all with your thumb… So just practice that until you've got
clean sounding notes. It moves up to C……. and I lightly mute, I
try not have as much fret noise as possible. So you obviously take your
finger off to play a clean note…… and then I just mute to stop the pop
afterwards with my left hand and my right hand actually…….
so with this part of the hand and with these fingers as well, so you're trying to
minimise a lot of extra fret noise. Also remember that you can really vary your
pop sound – you can have a full pop there or a really muted pop or somewhere
between. So you could change the amount of muting depending on the
bass line that you're playing, that's really a matter of taste and it's up to
you to get the sound that you want. So you might want to listen to some famous
slap players and just hear what they're doing and listen to how they mute their
pops differently.
Exercise Three is based on a disco line. We've got two bars of A and
then two bars of G and on the second bar of each chord we vary the rhythm
slightly. So we've got the octave pattern……… and the second bar……. If you look at the third beat – by
the way you can get this PDF remember below – so if you look at the third beat
of bar one we've got this pattern….. and if you look at the third beat of bar two
we've got this pattern….. so…… so those two bars….. and again the same thing on G…….. so like I said, that's a really typical disco line and you'd hear that with finger
style as well…… but it's quite nice with slap. We'll now move on to Exercise Four which
is a more complex groove. This exercise is based on an E chord and that's a
really common key for slap lines because you've got the open E…
At the bottom of
the bass. So it's easy to use. In this exercise we've got hammer-ons and for
those of you that don't know, a hammer-on is when you pluck the first note and
then play the second note with just your left hand, and that's a really common
technique in slap. So we start exercise four with two E's, open E's… and then hammer-on……. and then for the last beat of that bar we do two hammer-ons, the first one
we pluck, the second one we play with our thumb.
So we've got……. and we've got that funky bit at the end there…. So we're plucking the first hammer-on again and then we're playing a muted note and that's written with a crosshead
if you look on the PDF. So lightly mute with our left hand…… so we're playing a
muted note on the A and then a muted note on the B………. So we've got quite a few techniques just in those last two beats of that, so take that really slowly until
you're comfortable and then speed it up. The last exercise, Exercise Five is the most complicated one and it's got a slight Latin feel to it. So I'll play it for you
first and then I'll talk through the exercise………..
The exercise starts with a
slide up from G to A…. So really that bar there is A, the
next bar is E, and then another bar of E, and then back to A. So I'll play the
first two beats of the first bar….. and then……. So that bar……. and then we play the
same pattern, this time on E….. the third bar is the same as the second bar apart
from the last beat – so hammer-on hammer-on and we start both those with
our thumb……. and then the last bar….. so we've just got that slight change on the last
beat again……… So I'll play the whole thing slowly
three four…….. So take that exercise really slowly again I can't repeat that enough,
just don't try and play full speed straight away, get it all slowly bar by
bar and then you can speed it up when you're really secure in the exercise.
That's the end of the exercises, so I suggest you pick up the PDF below and
I'll leave the loops for these exercises running now at the end of this video.
So play along to those and really work on your groove and your time, listen to
the drums and try and lock in with them.
remember to subscribe to Greg's Bass Shed here on YouTube by clicking the subscribe button, the red button in the
corner and also take a look at my different playlists because there might
be some more exercises and lessons on there that are useful to you. I've also
got free bass resources and a free Members Area on my website gbshed.com so
you might want to head over there and I'll put the link below in the
description. This is Greg from Greg's Bass Shed, I'll see you in the next video..