Technique Of the Month
We’re delighted to welcome an amazing new column by the great Stu Hamm. If you’re looking for a killer technique to add to your bass-playing arsenal, Stu is here to help!
The legendary Stu Hamm reveals his killer moves in a not-tobe-missed new tutorial section
Welcome to the first instalment in a series of articles that I’ll be writing for my favourite bass magazines on both sides of the pond. This is truly a pleasure and an honour for me, so I’ll do my best to share with you a range of techniques that have been instrumental in my bass playing and songwriting. They will open up your ears and minds, and inspire you to practise, practise, practise.
Together, let’s find ways to incorporate these techniques into your bass playing, and then inspire you to come up with your own applications and innovations. You can reach me at hammstu@aol.com if you have questions or need clarification. I only charge $17.50 per reply… (Hey, Joel did ask me to include my singular brand of humour in these articles!)
Let’s start with a technique that is such a staple of my repertoire that I used it in the very first track of my first CD, Radio Free Albemuth, released back in 1988, as well as in the bass-line for the title track from my 2015 release The Book Of Lies… and seemingly in everything I’ve written in between! Let’s call it the “open string bend technique”, although we won’t actually be bending the open string, of course – we will be bending the string next to the open string up to the same note as the open string being played. This will create a unique and easily recognisable flange-like tone.
First I’d like you to play an open G. Now – how many other places on the neck of a four-string bass can you play the same note? I can think of three, as you can see in the tab of the first example over the page.
Example 1
You’ll notice that each of these Gs sounds completely different, due to its position on the neck and the size of the string. In future articles, we will discuss how and when to exploit these differences in tone and when to choose each position to complement the style of music that you’re playing. For now, we’ll stick to the D and G strings. Let’s play an F# on the 4th fret of our D string, and bend it up to a G, all the while playing our open G and letting it ring.
Example 2
As you can see in the lower picture, you will have to bend the F# on the D string away from the G string and towards the A string to allow the open G to ring. This will take some practice, but stick with it and you’ll be fine. You really need to arch your finger when you play the F# so that it won’t touch the open G and stop it from ringing. This will require quite a bit of finger strength, so I suggest that you use your middle finger, as it is usually the strongest. You’ll know that you are doing it right when, well… when it sounds good!
When you’re tuning your bass with harmonics, you can hear a beating sound created by the out-of-tune-ness of the strings. As you get closer and closer to the harmonics being in tune, the beating slows down and then disappears altogether when they’re in tune. This is the effect that you can really emphasise with a slow bend up of the F# to the G. All it will require is a lot of finger strength, which you can develop with – say them with me – Stu’s Three P’s: practice, patience, and the passage of time.
Next month I’ll be expanding on different ways to incorporate this technique into your playing, including some very cool riffs, but do get this example under your fingers so that we can forge ahead together.
I want to end with another awesome catchphrase: “Remember, it’s not the technique that matters, it’s how you use it musically to improve the song that you are playing” (Stuart Hamm, ™2018).
If you feel the urge to throw in the latest technique just because you can finally play it cleanly and in time, or just to show off, and this technique has nothing to do with the song or bass-line you are playing – then by all means put down your bass, go buy a guitar and become a guitar player! See you next month…
When you’re starting out, you can cheat a little by sliding the F# on the D string up to the G. You will still get some of the outof-phase flanging effect, but the tonal effect won’t be as dramatic.
You’re also free to experiment with how quickly you bend the F# up to the G. The longer you take to bend the first note all the way up to the exact pitch of the second, the more tension this technique creates. If you listen to the recording of the intro to The Book Of Lies (see below), you’ll notice that at the beginning of the song I bend up to the G immediately, so the technique is subtle at first. As the song progresses, I take longer and longer to bend the F# all of the way up to the G, to increase the dissonance and tension.
“THE LONGER YOU TAKE TO BEND THE FIRST NOTE ALL THE WAY UP TO THE EXACT PITCH OF THE SECOND, THE MORE TENSION THIS TECHNIQUE CREATES”