Wallowing in Root-Five with the Bluegrass Bass

Bill Monroe is rightly credited for creating the original bluegrass sound in 1945 or 46 – taking elements of what was then called Hillbilly music and infusing it with elements from African American blues.  Part of his genius was to realize that the five “standard” instruments of a bluegrass band (sans Resonator Guitar or Dobro™) create a perfect blend.  The timbres of each instrument – Guitar, Bass, Fiddle, Banjo and Mandolin – are distinct enough as to be easily recognizable in the ensemble, but similar enough to blend easily with each other.  Over the next several weeks, we will turn our attention to each particular instrument and what role they play in a modern bluegrass band.

Today we will focus on the bass.  My particular involvement with the string bass started with the Swamp Opera string band, an old time New York City street band from about 1977.  I have been playing this lowliest of instruments on and off ever since.  In the photo below, I am playing with the Faast and Blair Band in a concert in Washington State sometime during the summer of 2014 (credit to Eric Frommer for the picture).

The bass itself came to country or hillbilly music rather late – ensembles started including it in the early/mid part of the last century.  In more recent years, the bass has become just about mandatory in the modern bluegrass setting – our music has evolved to depend on the thumping, low frequency sounds as a pacemaker of sorts that keeps everybody in time.

We will cover a couple of interesting things regarding the bass and bass players in today’s post – I think you will find these items useful whether you are a listener, a bass player or even a person in a band with a bass player.  I will use the standup or doghouse bass as the example here but similar principles apply to electric bass.  Let’s start at the bottom layer of the “hierarchy” pyramid (see last week’s post for a detailed explanation of the pyramid) and work our way up to the top.

Sound:  Basic sound production for bluegrass bass is relatively straightforward (as long as you are sticking with pizzicato or plucking the strings).  Bluegrass bassists produce sound with either a “classical” or a “traditional” technique.  Classical technique generally produces better tone but I’ve heard some great sounding traditional bass players too.  Some bassists (such as yours truly) will use both techniques – classical for when tone and agility is needed and traditional for when the band wants to do 12 songs back to back in the key of B and the left hand starts to fatigue.  You can tell a bass player is using classical technique if they have their left elbow in the air and a serious expression on the face – for example the photo of me earlier in this blog post (queue the deodorant commercial).  If they are gripping the neck like a baseball bat and grinning from ear to ear then that is the traditional approach (expect to see a comedy routine too, as these guys are usually pranksters).  In the picture below, I am playing with a traditional approach and have a shit-eating grin on my face (hidden by the mic).  Photo credit: Clyde Clevenger.

With either technique, the objective is to sound just like Barry Bales, who always produces a big, warm, rich tone that rattles the windows and shakes your haunches.

Timing:  This is where the bass player earns every penny of the $10 he will receive in salary at the end of the night.  Once the song gets started, the bassist acts with impunity to place where the beat is.  Bass notes are easy for anyone to hear, as there are no other instruments competing for sound in that low octave.  Further, as anybody who lives in an apartment with a partying neighbor knows, low frequency sounds can penetrate anything (even concrete).  This makes the bass the perfect pacemaker for the band: all the other instrumentalists should be able to hear and feel it perfectly well and they need to follow along with it, else suffer the wrath of the bass player.  Note that most experienced bass players generally have good timing, and are consistently able to place the beginning of each thunderous note right on top-dead-center.  Assuming other band members cooperate, this helps considerably to reduce entropy in what otherwise would be a cacophonous situation. 

But what about the duration of each bass note?  Many bluegrass fans in general and bassists in particular don’t think about that.  Next time, listen carefully to every bass note.  Are they all even in duration or is one note shorter than the other?  There is a syndrome that is whispered about in bluegrass circles called  “limping bass.” It sounds like this: long/short – long/short – long/short… It is highly contagious and is ruinous to the groove.  If everything else is good and you still can’t dance to the music, this is where to look.  If your local bass player is infected with this disease and you really want to dance, be sure to address it with him carefully and in private along with a good bottle of single malt.  

Melody:  Melody?  What melody?  Well, Root-five.  Sounds like a sporting event?  Maybe the road that takes you to the gig?  Is it a term from dental school?  Nope, it’s none of the above.  Root-five is just the sequence of two notes played by a bluegrass bass player at least 90% of the time, over and over, like a broken record.  “Root” refers to the note in which a particular chord is rooted and “five” refers to the other bass note that is located five notes above “root.”  As our title suggests, bass players do indeed wallow in root-five and focus on the groove.  They don’t need no stinkin’ melody. 

Remember the golden rule of good bass playing: when bassists are excelling, nobody notices.  They are totally stealth, no ego, and no flash.  They wear black clothes and dark sunglasses to all the gigs.  They blend in completely with their root-five; nobody in the audience even knows they are there (this leads to widespread insecurity complexes among modern bluegrass bass players and can go a long ways in explaining their reclusiveness).

Root-five (90% of the time) is really important to achieve the sound expected in most traditional and contemporary bluegrass music.  I can imagine the non-traditionalists rolling their eyes right about now, and yes there are important exceptions to this. For example, Tom Gray did some outstanding and very tasteful work with the Seldom Scene, much of the time deviating from root-five.  But generally speaking, bluegrass music is already chock-full of busyness and a simplified bass line really helps bring some order to the situation.

What about the 10% of the time the bassist is not root-fiving?  Of course, there is the rare bass solo where the bassist steps into the limelight.  We will discuss this more as part of improvisation.  Other exceptions to the root-five rule include bass runs and a walking bass line, and both of these are discussed below as part of phrasing.

Rhythm:  This is the place where the bass player makes huge contributions to the sound.  It is where the groove really starts to develop for the band, and the bass is at the absolute center of it.  What kind of feel does the song have?  Is it driving?  Greasy? Peppy? Accomplished bass players will play legato (much more sustain) in greasy or syncopated songs and staccato in peppy tunes.  See how much greasy sustain the bassist Ronnie Bowman gets on the Lonesome River Band recording When You Go Walking and how much it seems to match what is going on with the rest of the band.  Contrast that with the recording of Georgia Mail by the same band which features a more staccato approach.  In addition, grace notes are a really cool way to add rhythmic feel to a bass line and are essential for slow and medium speed songs. Go get a recording of Eric Troutman playing bass on I Overlooked an Orchid with Danny Paisley and listen for short ghost notes that anticipate the beat on this slower song.   See if you can’t hear the “broken wheel” bass line (making a “pa-boom pa-boom” sound on each revolution):

The “pa” part is the ghost note and is a very short precursor (~ 1/32 note right ahead of the beat) to the “boom” notes. 

I feel compelled to write a few words on slap style bass, which is used both in bluegrass and old time.  Your bassist can turn heads for hundreds of yards around the jam by slapping his bass – it is a real attention getter.  However, just like cooking with spice, it should be used carefully and judiciously.  There are three basic slap styles – single, double and triple.  Single slap is simply pulling the string hard enough in the vertical direction such that it rebounds onto the fret board with a “snap”.  Double slap adds a single front-of-the-hand slap to the string snap.  Timing of a double slap is to put the hand slap ½ way between the bass string “snaps” with a straight eighth note time value.  Triple slap is a bit more complex and hard to describe in words; briefly it consists of the double slap (above) plus a second quick hand slap.  The time value of the string snap is still an eighth note and the hand slaps are two (sometimes swung) sixteenth notes.  The resulting sound resembles the fiddle shuffle or “do-dickey-do-dickey-do” kind of pattern (where “do” is the eighth note downbeat / string slap and “dickey” are the two following sixteenth notes as hand slaps).  One interesting variation is to switch to slapping “backwards” for a measure or two – reversing the “do” part of the “do-dickey” to being the offbeat and the “dickey” part the downbeat.  Your bassist can easily impress friends with this cheap and tasteless maneuver.  

Phrasing and Dynamics:  Phrasing of bass notes really comes into play during bass runs and fills.  Bass runs are the short sequence of notes (usually from a regular scale) that pull the song from one chord to another.  They are very useful especially in slow and medium paced songs and can give real motion to a performance.  Short bass runs either between chord changes or within a chord can be effective in filling during vocals when other instruments are not.  Walking bass is also a useful tool for a country shuffle.  Listen to recordings of Junior Husky back in the day to see how it should be done.  Briefly, a walk is where the bass player doubles up the number of notes she is playing – some of the best country walks are referred to as a “three” walk (root-three-five-three-root) and a “six” walk (not as structured as the “three” walk, it uses the notes in the “three” walk plus the addition of a “six” note).  Many random Ray Price songs feature a three walk and they really make you want to get out on the dance floor.

Improvisation:  OK I’ll go ahead and state what everybody is thinking and won’t say out loud:  Improv is not exactly encouraged for bluegrass bass (or airline pilots for that matter).  It can cause ugly crashes.  If your bassist wants to improvise in a continuous fashion like the rest of the guys, he should join a jazz band instead.  However, maybe the folks in the band are the kind of people that feel sorry for him – the journeyman bassist – reliably carrying the heaviest piece of equipment to each and every gig up and down staircases with no assistance, always holding down the rhythm in an uncluttered fashion, always sticking to root 5 with an occasional run, doing a great job of laying down a great groove 100% of the time and never complaining.  Further, he always seems to get blamed for things going wrong (especially speeding up) and never gets any of the credit when the groove is just perfect. 

Well, the solution to his now totally bruised and suppressed ego is for his (hopefully empathetic) band mates to give him a bass solo once in a while.  Turns out that absolutely anything he plays (even just continuing the root-five pattern while everybody else in the band stops playing) will elicit tremendous applause and admiration from the audience.  After all, they didn’t even know he was there the whole set and now all of the sudden there is this new really cool sound that pops out from behind the band all by itself… what is that?  THE BASS!  Oh look, my gosh, honey, it’s a BASS SOLO!  Let’s APPLAUD!  This is his chance to improvise… take some risk… play some wild notes…  People will clap even if they don’t have a clue what he is trying to accomplish.  Of course it is much better if he pulls off some pyrotechnics that even the Zambelli family would be proud of. 

Emotion:  The very best bass players will make an entire band sound good and raise chill bumps on even the most unenlightened souls.  And she will expect absolutely no recognition for the essential contribution, as she is merely the bass player.  So the next time you experience that rush of emotion from a great performance, you should not forget to thank the bass player.  It is simply impossible to produce a solid, awe-inspiring bluegrass performance without excellence on the part of the bassist. 

One thing worth mentioning to bass players and interested bystanders in the Internet age is the Talk bass forum (http://www.talkbass.com).  This is a great place to get solid information about bass technique, advice on buying equipment and repairs.  And they do have a bluegrass bass section!

Keep on pickin’!

The Bluegrass Hierarchy of Needs

Bluegrass Hierarchy of Needs?  I thought that was Maslow.... It was but read on ... Perhaps you have gone to a management seminar recently.  Or maybe you’ve hired a consultant to come in and fix your business for you.  Or maybe you just finished up a course in high school macroeconomics.  In any of these cases, I’d be willing to bet you encountered some form of the layered pyramid, illustrated below:

Modeling complicated real world scenarios and representing them as layered pyramids can simplify things and reduce complexities to terms and concepts that are easily understandable.  

Since we borrowed the Hierarchy of Needs from Maslow and used it as our title, let's start there as an example of a layered pyramid.  This one attempts to explain human behavior:

If you are currently worried about where your next meal is coming from, you are probably near the bottom and shouldn’t be reading this blog. If you are feeling all cozy inside curled up by the fireplace reciting Shakespeare you are right at the top and you shouldn’t be reading this blog either as you will find it trite and unimpressive.  Most bluegrass pickers, such as myself, are stuck in layer three trying to figure out how to rebuild an intimate relationship with our spouse after an intense weekend of staying up all night picking and drinking with buddies and rolling in the mud at the local bluegrass festival.

Another example: In computer networking and telecommunications, there is the standard ISO model, which, in seven layers, enables an endpoint (computer, cellphone, teletype) to reach out and communicate with any other endpoint in the world (below).

  

Since you are almost certainly reading this blog online right now, you can thank the standard ISO model for the ability to do that.  The piece of software that you are using (e.g. a Chrome browser) is the top layer.  You don’t have to worry about the other layers until your dog chews thru the network cable (he just took out the physical layer).

It is outside of our scope to go into either of these models in any more detail.  However, as can be seen from a casual inspection of either of these examples, basic building blocks are represented in the lower layers and more advanced functionality is shown in the higher layers.  Individual layers take dependencies on lower ones and create something of value that can be consumed by layers above.  And the net result is an easy way to conceptualize a view of a highly complex topic such as human behavior or how computer networking works.

I’d like to take the same approach in representing music.  Please see figure 3 below.  Note that this applies to instrumental music. Songs with words are slightly different and will be covered in a later blog post.

Here, the concept of music is broken down into seven individual layers – basic physical concepts such as pitch and tone are in the bottom layers and more complex layers such as dynamics and emotion are at the top.  As in the two examples cited above, the idea here is that any individual layer will utilize building blocks from an adjacent lower layer, add their value, and then pass the result onto the subsequently higher layer.  Pitches and tones will be taken from the bottommost layer and assembled by the second layer as (say) quarter and half notes in a particular time signature and then passed on to the third layer to be assembled into a melody.  This process is repeated layer by layer until reaching the top layer – human emotion. 

Let us now proceed to describe the useful purpose of such a model.  One application is that of learning an instrument. The idea here is to master the lower layers before tackling any of the upper layers. 

·      Layer 1:  First, figure out how to get in tune and play in tune; learn how to produce a basic good, robust tone from your instrument.  An example: study the holding of the pick or the bow and how to get the strings to achieve a pleasant sound.  Important note:  I can tell you from personal experience that it can take decades to progress beyond layer one if the fiddle is your instrument of choice.  If you lack patience, choose a different instrument.  You can transition through layer one in a single day with a harmonica (no offense to harmonica players – you definitely catch up in the upper layers).

·      Layer 2:  Focus on timing – use a metronome and make sure you can play in time – learn how to place your notes on top-dead-center. Learn what it means to play ahead or behind the beat.

·      Layer 3:  Learn how to play the melody.  If you are to be a great musician, you need to focus on the melody before using fancy licks or improvisation, which doesn’t occur until layer 6!  Trust me, developing the skill to play melody will pay dividends in time to come – especially in the “taste” department.  Note that there are certain licks that are critical to a particular style (such as the archetypal licks used in Scruggs style banjo).  These are fundamental as well and need to be learned as if they are part of the melody.

·      Layer 4:  Put sparkle in your playing by adding syncopation and lilt.  Go back to the metronome and see if you can’t syncopate the 16^th notes that occur between the beats.  Better yet, buy a metronome (or a metronome app) that can ‘swing’ the time and set it to click on 16^th notes.  Play along with CDs and see if you can feel the groove.

·      Layer 5: Everybody loves machine gun style mandolin or banjo but it becomes monotonous after a measure or two.  Learn how to create phrases and spaces between phrases of notes.  Add some drama to your breaks with dynamics (loud and soft, building to crescendos and so forth).

·      Layer 6:  People frequently ask me how to improvise.  I have yet to come up with a clear explanation except that this is an emergent phenomenon that happens when you have reached a certain skill level on an instrument.  I will say that there is some risk involved – and like everything else in life, the more risk you take the higher the reward (and higher the pain is if you fail).  Some basic things to consider when improvising are as follows:  Think about what kinds of notes and licks fit well in certain chords or song structures.  Start with the melody – are there alternate notes that might fit?  Think about creating some dissonances and then resolve them back to the melody or chord structure.  Think about patterns – in the time domain, beating three against four, or in the note domain, perhaps adjacent “triplicates” of notes that aren’t necessarily in the key or chord structure.  

·      Layer 7:  If you have done everything right in the lower layers, and have things firmly encoded in muscle memory, you can now focus on the emotional aspects.  Do you want to convey sadness?  Excitement?  Discomfort?  It can be entertaining to go directly to emotion without going thru the lower layers.  I’ve been accused of this and two-year-old toddlers do it all the time. 

To summarize, our layered pyramid model of bluegrass music can help guide the learning and practicing of an instrument.  Be sure you have the lower layers nailed down before you start focusing on the upper layers.

As always thanks to my wife Andrea for inspiration, ideas and incredible editing skills. 

Keep on pickin’!

Listening

Why would any sane person put pieces of metal on the ends of one’s fingers and then spend 10,000 hours doing thumb-middle-index-thumb-middle-index-thumb-middle with their right hand over and over and over in front of a metronome? 

So people can listen.

Why would a reasonable person try to hyper-extend a pinky seven inches above the rest of the left hand just to get a decent Bill Monroe chop chord?  Or spend hours pulling on catgut until blisters as big as silver dollars arise on the index finger of the right hand?

So people can listen.

Isn’t that what it is all about?  Listening?

We spent the last several blog posts learning about what musicians do to produce a good groove.  I now want to turn to our ears – and the subject of listening – and really hearing this groove.  This is important whether or not you are a musician.  Building listening skills can greatly deepen your experience with the music if you don’t pick and can significantly accelerate your learning processes if you do pick.

Let me start with a musician’s perspective.  Most folks who pick don’t think of playing and listening as two separate things.  But I think you’ll find it is helpful to do just that.  You have playing skills and listening skills – and these are different from each other.  Let’s briefly cover playing skills first.

Playing skills involve getting your fast-twitch muscles to twitch at exactly the right time, and then committing it to memory.  People talk about muscle memory.  This is a bit of a misnomer (because it happens primarily in your brain and nervous system and not your muscles) but is an important part of execution – i.e. playing skills.  Muscle memory is when you don’t have to think about the individual notes but instead think at the phrase or maybe even think at the emotional level.  For example: I am playing this break and feel like I should add some drama here and I know just the lick and here it goes… 

In the “training” phase (before you have muscle memory of a particular lick) the thinking part might go:  “index finger, second fret, first string, pick down, then middle finger on the third string, fourth fret, pick up” and so forth.  When you get this sequence in muscle memory you no longer need to think in these individual “string, finger, pick direction” terms but at the higher level of: “I know this perfect lick, it feels just right and here it goes”…  This is absolutely essential to perform good music, because the conscious processes in your brain can’t possibly think fast enough to play at the speed of a song if they are going note-by-note.   Nor would it be possible to follow those emotional hunches that come up when you are taking a break that “this lick feels like it will fit.”  

Now to the listening part... When a musician is executing a series of notes, that musician is also obviously listening to the notes as they are being played.  But you will find it helpful to view the listening part of this as a totally separate process.   In fact, just as you are training your fast twitch muscles and imbedding countless phrases into muscle memory, your ear is simultaneously getting trained to recognize this series of notes as a “lick”.  Believe me, once you’ve spent 400 hours trying to get that eight notes that constitute the reverse roll lick in Earl’s breakdown just right, you will instantly recognize it when you hear it on XM61.  So your ear has gotten trained in the process.

Further, you also can train your ear to hear all the subtleties we discussed last time such as timing and syncopation.  For example, if you are paying attention to the right things, you can hear when musicians start rushing the beat or perhaps playing behind the beat for a phrase or two.  Even if you are not a musician, the next time you are sitting at a bluegrass concert, concentrate on the mandolin break to see if he is rushing.  See if you can detect the bass player trying desperately to hold things back.  Listen for the duration of each bass note.  Are they consistent?  Are they sustained or staccato?  I will be posting on how to listen to each individual instrument in future editions of this blog so stay tuned.

There is another important benefit of thinking about the playing and listening processes as separate things.  Playing skills and listening skills can progress at different rates and being aware of this can shed light on problems that might be happening in your performances. For example, sometimes my playing skills progress very rapidly and my listening skills might lag behind a bit.  Boy, do I sound good to myself!!!  Quit the day job and buy a bus!!!  This is because I am playing better than my ability to listen.  My licks all sound fantastic to me – I’ve got all these great new licks in muscle memory now and can actually execute them!  However, little do I know that my ear hasn’t progressed quite to the point where I can discern some of the subtleties missing in these licks that other players perhaps have mastered. 

How about the reverse… listening skills become better than playing skills? Yep, that has happened to me too.  Sometimes my listening skills have progressed rapidly and perhaps my playing skills have not.  Maybe I’ve gotten to the point of where I start to hear and recognize the subtleties that my buddies are playing in that great new lick I learned last month and realize all of the sudden that even though I know the lick, it doesn’t sound quite right.  At this point in time it sounds to me like I’m going backwards (e.g. getting worse) because I’ve spend a zillion hours on that lick and my ear has learned to hear that it is not quite right at this point when it used to sound great.   My listening skills have improved and my playing skills have remained the same.

Boy this is depressing – in fact, the more I play the worse I sound!  If you are a musician, I can guarantee you have experienced this more than once – and it makes you feel like you want to go wrap your ’23 Loar around the nearest oak tree.  Some people call this “plateauing” and it happens to all of us, and is probably the biggest cause of a potentially good musician giving up music for good and going out and getting a real job (which he is going to need to pay for that broken Loar).

As you develop your listening skills, you will find you can listen to music at all different levels.  When you turn your attention to each phrase and note, you can start to hear recognizable licks – and how they are being executed.  You can hear the different types of lilts or grooves in each individual song.  Is it greasy?  Driving?  Peppy?  What are the chords to the song?  Does it go from a I to a V or a IV? (I will cover Nashville notation and how to hear chords in a future blog post.)  What about the vocal arrangement?  Is it two harmonies above the lead or tenor-above the lead and baritone below?  You can also start to make a pretty good guess as to what key the song is in, even if you don’t have perfect pitch (hint: listen for open strings).  Just be careful you don’t drive off the road!

Keep on pickin’!