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Musical Terms for the Bass Guitar | Touch & Tone | Making Connections: The Modes
Michael Tarabay

Touch & Tone

by Dan Berkowitz

At a gig, do you ever stop and think about what your right hand is doing? Your left? The touch you use with your hands has a lot to do with the tone you produce…and of course, you want to sound your best at the gig.

I believe that many players attack the strings too hard. It must be something about the "manly" nature of low notes that beckons for more attack. Or it could be a simple lack of understanding about how much attack is needed. For the new player, there's so much to think about already, just getting the notes and the time right. But without thetouch being right, too, a player's real skill might not be obvious. I'm writing here just about fingerstyle playing…slap style is a completely different kind of playing.

My ideas about touch and tone came to mind a couple of months ago when I worked as the house bass player at a local jam. My string attack is clear but not particularly hard…and I've never broken a string in nearly 30 years of bass playing.

As each bass player came up to play, I asked them about their touch and had them play a few notes. For almost every one, I had to turn down my amp's input gain to keep the clip light off, even though my bass had the hottest pickups of any that I saw. The last player surprised me the most, though. He'd been playing in a local band for several months and I expected he'd have decent touch and care about his tone. I set him up and things were fine for the first song. And then I saw the clip light on the amp start to blink, and then the compressor light was continuously glowing red, and then the clip light stayed on most of the time. And then he ended the last song with a big bash on the strings that just produced a toneless crunch…and this was blues, not metal.

That blues jam made a couple of points clear. First, without touch, there's little chance of tone. And second, if the music gets louder, don't just bash harder. As a guitar player friend once explained, "Let the amp do the work." If the music gets louder and the players stay at that volume level, just turn up the amp a bit and keep the same degree of attack (and of course, if the amp is dimed, it may be time for a bigger amp-bashing still won't help).

My first revelation about the value of touch came while listening to a blues band with a really strong bassist. He drove the band, adding life to the music of the other excellent players he worked with. During a break, I asked him about his technique. He said he'd never quite gotten over "that Jaco thing" and played between the pickup and bridge most of the time. I tried it, and was surprised about how much cleaner my playing became. Looking down at the body of my old Jazz bass, I saw that the wear marks in the finish came from resting the right arm on the body while playing near the neck. That's not surprising, because Fender basses were designed to be played there…just take a look at the location of the thumb rest on a photo you might find on the Web. But it wasn't the best place for developing a good sound through careful touch.

My first lessons in touch probably came by necessity. In the early '70s, most affordable amps were low powered and their transistor circuits sounded really nasty when played too hard. But that was good experience for keeping my right-hand touch under control. A few points about touch stand out:

- Think about where your right hand is located. Do you play closer to the neck? The bridge? The middle? Each location requires a different touch to sound its best. For example, you can play with a harder attack near the bridge, because the string is tighter there. By the neck, you'll find the string is a bit floppier and a harder attack will start to sound out of control. One young bassist complained to me that his bass always rattled. I checked the setup and it was fine. But his attack was very hard and close to the neck, making his playing sound out of control…and very trebly.

- Think about what your left hand is doing. Yes, the left hand is part of your overall touch, too. A few years ago, I started thinking about my left hand and discovered that I'd learned to damp the unplayed strings without thinking about it. As an experiment, I stopped doing that and found that my playing sounded instantly muddier as the stray notes began to mingle with each other. It just takes light contact to do this, but left-hand damping can add quite a bit to how your playing comes through.

- What about your amp settings? Do you have the amp set too low and then play really hard to make up for it? If your amp's EQ section is set up for the mid-scooped (or "smiley face" on a graphic EQ) sound, boosting midrange frequencies around 500 to 800 hz … or at least not cutting them…can help you cut through the band without as hard of an attack. If you see your amp's limiter or compressor light flashing a lot, see what happens by playing with a lighter attack and a bit more volume on the amp…your tone will likely get fuller and more solid.

- What's your bass setup like? If you play with a harder attack, you'll need higher action and more relief (a bit more "bow") in your neck to avoid a lot of rattling and buzzing. If you learn to play with a lighter touch, you can lower the action. That will make fast playing easier and help your fingers get through the night more comfortably.

Sometimes we take our playing touch for granted, but it's an important part of becoming a top-notch bass player. I noticed this one time when my band was in the studio and our guitarist…a very good guitar player with a solid grasp of theory…recorded a track on my bass. The next time we got together, the recording engineer brought up the difference between the guitar player's touch and mine. "I really appreciate your playing now," the engineer told me. "When I listened to his, I had to apply a lot of compression to even things out, because his touch was so uneven." I guess I should have noticed that after I had to turn my amp way down when he used it. But the value of a more disciplined right- and left-hand touch hadn't stood out so clearly until that moment.