After only a few weeks rehearsal, I had my first gig with The Missing Persians the other week at the Talbot Inn in Eynsham, and very good it was too! A couple of hours of playing with some really good musicians in a style I don’t really get anywhere else – I had a great time, and can’t wait for the next one. The upright bass got a rare outing, and let me show off some of the work I’ve been doing on my technique over the past few months.
I’m self-taught as a musician, and when I got the electric upright (double) bass I simply figured I’d apply the same concepts to this as I had to everything else I play; that is to dive in there and work it out as I go along. Well, although it’s technically possible to play upright bass like a fretless bass guitar which you hold upright (as the name might suggest), if you’re going to play for more than a few minutes at a time it really requires a completely different approach. The main difference to the way you play the thing isn’t really the fact that it’s fretless, or that it’s upright. It’s the fact that the strings feel fatter and heavier, and therefore require a lot more effort to push them down to create a note. As I’d already gone through a similar process with guitar and bass, I guessed that I just needed to keep working at it and eventually I’d gain more strength in my fingers and be able to play for longer.
Luckily, in a conversation at a gig with the drummer, I spoke about this and he recommended I went to see Tim Dawes in Oxford for some pointers. He took a look at my “technique” and told me that using the “one finger per fret” bass guitar method I was putting too much strain on my knuckles and could end up with arthritis. Not good for my hopes of playing long into old age. What was good was that he was able to quickly show me the “bassics” so that I was able to adapt my style when playing the upright bass.
In a nutshell, whereas with a bass guitar (or guitar) you tend to have a one finger per fret grip on the neck, with the upright bass you sort of add another finger to the string as the note you want to play gets higher, and treat the ring finger and little finger as one. This means only playing three notes before you need to shift the position of the hand.
While this is a bit of a tricky shift to get into for someone who’s been playing bass guitar for over 30 years, I’m already noticing that my left hand isn’t as tired as is was when I was trying to play it like an upright, fretless bass guitar and when people look at me playing they’ll think I’m an experienced double bassist! (At least that’s what Tim says)
You can see how accomplished you think my technique is at the next Missing Persians gig at the Famous Monday Blues tomorrow night! (http://www.famousmondayblues.co.uk/)