This is a beautiful song by Benny Sings, it has a great arrangement and feel to it, aided not in small part by the wonderful bass line (and some stellar production to boot). To me the bass here is all about note lengths, phrasing and sound. We can transcribe what Benny did as a starting point but getting to a place where YOU, the player, are satisfied with all three is the ultimate goal. 1) Note Lengths When you listen to any bass part, notice the note lengths. Not only where they begin, but where do they end? What kind of attack and decay characteristics are there? Try to hone in on those types details when you practice. With electric bass especially, sometimes the notes can ring out seemingly forever. That makes the player responsible for choosing when and how to end those notes. which brings us to… 2) Phrasing Listen to how Benny phrases the bass part here. Just beautiful. There’s a lot of room at this tempo, especially with the lack of obvious subdivisions (like in a hi hat for example) dictating the underlying rhythmic current, to put the bass in different places and still have it be technically “correct”. But what feels best? My bass teacher Ben Street used to say (when discussing a jazz two feel) that instead of picturing time and feel as some finite, rigid clicks happening along a grid, to picture a circle, and the bass note 1 and 3 is the top of the circle and the drum’s beats 2 and 4 are the bottom of the circle, and you two together are trying to make the circle as wide as possible. And a wide circle is what we call groove. That all sounds very abstract until you put that visualization into practice, and when you get into that zone you’ll know it! Here Benny’s bass phrases are laid back, but not so much so that the feel becomes cumbersome or dragging. Just enough to make you nod your head. 3) Sound: The ever elusive, always mystifying x factor. These days I’m trying to focus less on tone specifics, and more just on making my playing fit well with the drummer and the band. But sometimes parts and playing are so dependent on what kind of sound you’re getting that day, that they cannot be separated. So I recommend practicing and trying to get your sound to a place where you’re happy with it at home, and so that it works for you in what you’re trying to play. And then having that sound vividly enough in your head that you will be able to replicate it in different rooms and studios and venues, or wherever else your music might take you. Here Benny gets a nice mellow, thick sound, lots of space for bass. I tend to use a light touch and mute my strings with a strip of a mousepad for a sound like this (not too dissimilar to the type of sound Familyman gets on classic Bob Marley recordings)
Until next time, JB