Slap It!

Hello Guitar – and Bass friends!

If you’re a long time guitar player, you probably have gone through all the degrees of “guitar boredom”. Whether you’ve tried to improve your technical ability, scales or learning new songs, the boredom is always lurking behind your shoulder. Sometimes keeping your guitars in rack do the trick and sometimes you might find something totally new, inspiring thing to do – like I did!

As I wrote in my post of Japanese pop singer/songwriter/guitarist Miwa (https://jannesmusic.blogspot.com/2019/08/artists-bands-miwa.html) , I started to look at the Japanese pop and rock. While browsing this new exciting world, I came across to a YouTube video of Japanese female guitarists. It’s amazing how skilled guitarists there are! One guitarist, TOMO-ZO led me to dig out more of  the band she was playing, a Gacharic Spin. Group is playing fantastic energetic rock. It’s actually unfair to put them into any genre as style drifts between pop-rock-metal. What really caught my attention was the band leader KOGA’s slap bass that felt like totally new thing in this kind of music – most of the songs are fast paced rock and imagine a slap bass in there along with distorted guitar and pop-keyboards… well you don’t have to imagine, I’ll put an example for you. There has been way more ”wtf?” moments with Gacharic Spin that I’ve experienced with any other band. All players are skilled musicians, for example Hana in drums plays 10 Instruments (has moved from drums to guitar & vocals recently) and in best players of all instruments Koga was voted 15th best bass player in Japan - being the only female player in any top lists. I will make a post of this amazing band, but meanwhile, here are some examples:

And from the lighter side:

Anyway this band is a fresh breath to the music I’ve listened… and the seed of an idea of starting to learn slap bass was planted.

There’s a small stock of rarely used guitars under my bed – not to hide them from my wife, no no… and one bass; a cheap short scale Harley Benton from Thomann that I bought years ago to have a bass should I need one in my covers / songs. After dusting and tuning it was playable – even with the old original strings, not great but playable. But there’s no such thing as too bad excuse to let your GAS flow freely, so I ordered a ”Jazz bass” from Musicstore.de. It’s similar to Harley Benton Jazz bass but as its delivery time was 2 weeks, I chose J&D instead. Very good nicely finished bass (pics), couldn’t find any problem what so ever.

Basic bass playing with the pick is not the hardest thing to do, but playing with fingers and slapping is another story. It seem to take quite some time to get your all fingers in sync. Slapping with thumb is not hard, but “popping” with your right hand index / ring finger requires training to get it smooth.

I’ve learned bass only a month or so – every now and then, and though that in order to prevent premature Bass Boredom by playing with metronome, I need to start to learn a song as well. I’ve always liked soul / disco bass lines and found nice song “He’s the greatest dancer” by Sister Sledge. Lerned it and uploaded a video in to the “sister channel” Janne’s Bass that I created for my bass stuff:

This cover video is special; I played & mixed with iPad and also for the very first time, edited the video with iPad. Stay tuned as soon there will be a post ”iMoved from iMac to iPad” :) 

Will post my bass progress (if any), follow ”Janne’s Bass” tags if interested!

Thanks for visiting and see you soon! :)