Lastly, in talking about basic things, a lot of bass players play slap bass and that is accomplished by slapping the bass with the thumb of your right hand. Basically, what you want to kind of do is a rocking motion with your thumb striking the string. Also, when I used to do this at the beginning, I used to hit the strings really hard. But really, it does not take really hard to take it. I am going to just play you a scale using the thumb instead of the fingers.
[demonstration]
It looks like I am hitting the strings hard but I am really not. And basically, I am striking on the side of the string. There are two kinds of methods that you could use. You can use the up and down stroke technique which Victor Wooten does really successfully that I cannot do it really successfully because I am going to show you the on attack and I have learned other tricks where Victor Wooten has to use half the strength to play something that would be like this.
[demonstration]
I just use the technique that I have used to make it sound that it will work for me. And, that is basically just the hammer on technique in the up and down motion of the hands, the thumb striking the string and then it is always doing an upstroke with the first finger. So we have a down stroke there then upstroke with the first finger. [demonstration]. And we want to start slowly. Octaves are the easiest things to practice. [demonstration]. Get it like that. That took me about two days. So, if you practice really intently, I will have it explained on icons of rock. If your really have a problem, go to my website www.tonysaunders.com and ask me a question and I will answer it pretty quickly.
When using this techniques, anything that you can play with your fingers, you could play with your thumb and use that technique. So I can play [demonstration]. The scales, practice the scales [demonstration] and practice the 8th note [demonstration] and the same thing with the thumb. So, anything that you could do with the fingers, you could do it with the thumb and it is the same way. The more that you practice, the better you will get. And the more time that you put in doing the thumb practicing, the more fluid that you will get. In future lessons, we will have more detailed technique on how to do that. Basically, one thing that I would practice a lot on is the thumb striking the string and then with the first finger doing the octave. So we got [demonstration]. You want to create like a rocker motion. And, the other key is that we do not want to have the notes so that they do not sound.
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