Gio, are you playing with a drummer? Typically you have to collaborate with the drums so that your bass sits in with the kick drum or vice versa. So it really depends on if your drummer is playing the same exact beat as the original song.

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

Work it out until you get it. —

http://www.satanspilgrims.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Satans-Pilgrims/8210228553
https://satanspilgrims.bandcamp.com/
http://www.surfyindustries.com

synchro wrote:

I usually start by playing the melody and then branch out to a proper bass part.

Synchro from Gretsch-Talk? Hello! Nice to see someone here I know. Didn’t know you were a surf player.

Gio wrote:

Do you copy the song note by note, do you improvise/compose your own parts to the song, or both? sorry for the stupid question.

It's pretty simple usually) A D E, than repeat)

Waikiki Makaki surf-rock band from Ukraine

https://linktr.ee/waikikimakaki

Lost Diver

https://lostdiver.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/vitaly-yakushin

When I first commented on this thread, I was pressed for time, but today I’ll try to explain further.

If I’m learning a new song, whether guitar, bass, or whatever, I always start with the melody, which gives me the basic flow of the song. Once the melody is “under my fingers”, so to speak, which is to say that once I’m familiar with the melody and can ply it fluidly, I start to think about the chord changes and how they support the melody. Even if I am playing strictly a lead line, knowing the chords helps to find more efficient fingerings, because melodies usually come down to tension against, or resolution with notes of the chord. So if I’m playing a song in C Major, when the C chord is in use, I’m most likely fingering out of a C Major triad (or arpeggio), if the chord changes to an F Major, I am most likely fingering out of an F Major triad (or arpeggio).

With bass parts, it’s usually a matter of roots and fifths of the chords and connecting notes. Even if the bass part is a complex walking bass line, it’s most likely going to stayed anchored to the root of the fifth of the chord, or possibly the third. When I’m playing bass, I’m usually selecting fingerings based upon simple, one octave arpeggios.

The only other thing I would offer is that you can start simple and add complexity later, if you feel that the song requires it. Simple alternating bass lines of roots and fifths will take you pretty far. With just a little bit of thought towards connecting tones, a simple root/fifth bass line can become a thing of real beauty.

Guitar has been my main instrument since the days of the Beatles, but I love playing bass. It’s sort of fun to lay the foundation of a song and just keep it going in a steady fashion. I find that playing bass, and being solid, requires strict discipline and is good practice for my lead work. It’s one thing to play a lead line where you can play right on top of the beat, behind the beat, or even push the beat slightly, but it’s quite another matter when you are the beat.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

Last edited: Jul 08, 2022 07:23:54

Hey Gio,

Welcome to SG101!

The answer to your question depends on your ultimate goal for the song and what you want to get out of it.

Do you want the song to sound authentic, correct, vintage, retro, true to the spirit and time in which it was composed?

Or do you just want to make it your own from the get-go?

Do you want to really get inside the song and understand it deeply, or do you just want a quick, cool end result?

If it's the former--it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to learn the bass line and attempt to replicate the tone on the record EXACTLY.This is an extremely valuable lesson and will teach a tremendous amount about amps, strings, types of basses, eq, speaker cabinets, picking techniques, picks, recording techniques as well as 60s bass line philosophies, registers, mixing, what's best for the song rather than the individual player, and on and on. This is how to learn Surf music at the core. Go to the source and STUDY. Do the work. Research and homework is fundamental.

If you don't understand the inside and outs of the original, you can't really intelligently, thoughtfully or consciously change it, because you never really learned it in the first place. How can you change what you don't understand?

Then again, if you just want to keep it all light, shallow and float on the surface, who cares in the first place? Just make up your own anything right off the bat. But at that point, isn't it just becoming your own song anyway, so why not make it 100% original and not even have a connection to the cover track at all?

Insect Surfers
The Tikiyaki Orchestra
The Scimitars
Lords Of Atlantis
Fiberglass Jungle - Surf Radio

My method involves getting a high-quality soundfile of the song onto my computer, a stereo version if at all possible (a lot of the classic tunes were released in mono and stereo versions).

First I figure out if the tune was recorded or mastered at A440. If not, I adjust the soundfile using an editing program like Sound Forge, Audacity, etc. that has a built-in pitch shift feature, and then I save the pitch-corrected version as my new go-to reference.

Sometimes it might be hard to pick out the bass line in a recording. But often, the stereo mixes of vintage tunes have rather extreme stereo panning of the instruments. Using the sound editing program, by muting each channel one at a time, I determine which side has a clearer-sounding bass. Sometimes it's obvious because the bass is mixed to just one side, but other times it's more or less in the center, and other instruments are more hard panned one way or the other, in which case I figure out which side has less obscured bass. And then I copy just that channel and paste it over the other channel, creating a mono track. Occasionally I will also adjust the EQ of the soundfile to make the bass more audible, but only if necessary. Then I save that sound file (I call it my "training wheels" file) and use it to teach myself how to play the bass line.

Often it's a tune I'm already familiar with as a listener, and then it's just a matter of listening to it over and over again, but paying specific attention to the bass part, and memorizing it to the best of my ability. I may try to play along right away, or I might wait until the bass line is more deeply engraved into my head from repeatedly listening to it. If the bass line is unintuitive or otherwise difficult to remember for some reason, I will parse the song into its constituent sections and just learn it piece-by-piece (e.g., intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, outro, etc.). It can sometimes help if your media player has a speed adjustment function, you can slow it down to maybe 75 or 80% and learn more difficult bits. Sometimes the bass line in the original recording might have mistakes, or might have some tentative and inconsistent playing in it because it was an early take where a concrete bass part wasn't fully composed, but they decided to keep the take because it sufficiently captured what they were going for. In that case I will try and "correct" any obvious mistakes or vague bits as I learn to play it.

At first I might try and find the easiest way to play it (i.e., being that most of the time there is more than one spot to play the same note on the fretboard), but as I get more familiar with it, I will try and play it on the fretboard where it will most closely resemble the tone of the source recording or otherwise sound the best to my ear, even if it's a bit more physically challenging.

When it's a song I'm not familiar with in the first place, I will try and get as familiar as possible with the chords of the song via repeated listening. It's a good idea to do that with any song, no matter how familiar you might be with it; it always makes learning the bass part easier.

Once I become familiar enough with how to play the bass part, I will go back to my original pitch-corrected reference version of the file (as opposed to the mono "training wheels" track I created) and play along with that, paying careful attention to the bass tone and how it fits with the rest of the instruments. Sometimes I will adjust the EQ on my player to cut out a lot of the low end, so I can better hear myself in the context of the song.

Even long after you've learned the song well enough to play it regularly with your band so that you don't need to play along with the original recording anymore, it helps to go back and carefully listen to the original version of it occasionally to keep yourself correctly on course, as over time you might "drift" and start introducing subtle incorrect bits. Or you might catch little things that you never paid attention to when you were learning it, but now you can incorporate them into your playing to make it sound even more authentic and refined.

-Dire

Last edited: Feb 04, 2022 04:51:23

Oh, he never came back.

So maybe he is still researching.

On some of the old songs i have an incredible hard time to figure out what the bassplayer was doing there in the studio.

But if you keep at it, it will eventually get easier

So i have two advices:

1. Don't give up
2. use Flatwounds!