Next Level Bassist Left Hand

days a week I do my practice on a second bass, which has no dots. The
interesting thing is that when I play that instrument, I still have the
concept of the grid in my mind even though it isn’t there visually.
How has this concept impacted your playing?
Here’s and example that could be easily written down: Suppose you
are playing a Baroque sonata in D major and you get to a cadence
descending from the G harmonic g F # E D. Many traditional bass
players would begin with the 3 rd finger harmonic and play 3 4 4 1 or
3 4 1 1. Or maybe they’d play + 3 1 + with the thumb on the harmonics.
Maybe someone would play 3 2 4 1 down the G string. What I would
probably do now is play 2 1 + 2, ending on the D string. Why? That is
D Major. The descending line fits in that D major hand position –
harmonically it’s a 4 3 suspension resolving to D (F # trill E (short) D).
That makes sense with the fingering, the phrase, the harmony, and the
resonance of the bass. The previous fingering, 3 2 4 1, might be musically
appropriate if the music was more passionately legato and an
expressive inner hand slide from the F # to the E were in order.
Let’s look at the default move that bass players often do: we play the
G harmonic with thumb and play the other notes down the D string.
This often sounds muddy because you have a half step across the
two strings, with an F # sounding against the ringing G harmonic.
Violinists try to avoid half steps in string crossings whenever possible
because it just doesn’t sound good, especially with an open string. It’s
comfortable to put your thumb on the harmonic at first, but with a
little time, it’s just as comfortable
to put the thumb on
the E and B and build your
hand setting down from
the harmonic. With a little
more time after that, it’s just
as comfortable to build the hand
setting down another half step and
play it in D b Major, or any other key.
There is also the component of
strength and balance. The semichromatic
(Petracchi) hand setting I
use in the example above is a strong
hand setting that uses only the top two strings and allows the player
to play any of those four notes and be contextually grounded in the
D major harmony. The brain and autonomic nervous system can put
all of this together in a repeatable, contextualized construct: the 1 st
finger F # will be a pure F # , in tune with the D harmonic under your
second finger. Staying in this hand setting, the C # can be played on
the D string, the E with the thumb on the G string; these build the C #
diminished in D Major. If you then decide to move your hand position
up or down, you can go from the dominant (V or vii) to the tonic
(I), maintaining the harmonic grounding of the hand position all the
while. The applications here are infinite in both written music, where
we are striving to solidify intonation, and improvised music, where we
are seeking expressive approaches to harmonic ideas.
As both an improviser and as an interpreter of written music, it’s
interesting to have a specific physiological context for each harmonic
context I encounter. This approach has helped my ear to improve, it
helped my intonation grow, and my accuracy is better. Of course I
still have lots of room for improvement; it’s a lifelong process, but it’s
no longer “put my thumb on this harmonic and try to play Bach’s 2 nd
Suite!” And we’re not limited to 2 nd finger on the harmonic either (as
in the above example). If you place your 1 st finger on the G harmonic,
maintaining D Major, you now have access to the A on the G string
with 3, and you have the triad in your hand frame. So when I improvise
solos over changes in D, for example, I can access different instinctual
musical language by setting my hand in different hand-settings: by
setting my thumb on D,
1 st finger on D, or 2 nd finger
on D - each of these enable
different ideas to emerge.
Each hand setting lends
itself to different sonic
vocabularies, because it allows
intuitive access to specific notes
and chromatic approach tones,
etc. I think this is really the wave
of the future, at least for myself. It
doesn’t matter whether I’m playing
an accompaniment role, a solo
role, or just thinking about the way a passage could sound beyond the
limitations of the bass. Anyway, these some of the tools I’m using these
days to expand my expressive capacity.
Is there a technique book you recommend
for this approach?
From what I understand, Edgar doesn’t have a pedagogical method
assembled for this, and from what I hear and have seen, he doesn’t
really work any codified pedagogy per se with his students, except
“make it sound great, and be dependable in performance”.
David Allen Moore, who is one of the most comprehensively thoughtful
and observant learners I’ve ever met, has observed Edgar closely,
and also spoken to him about specific technical approaches. (By the
way, Rex also studied in California with David and Paul Ellison).
David and I have talked in the past about developing a flow chart for
SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL BASSIST 29