Some examples of typical bass-player techniques might include a moving (“walking”) bass part with accented notes on the beats or the the root notes of the current chord, and slightly softer passing tones, adding some musical “push” or motion to the tune without overly accentuating the bassline. But a more experienced bass player will tend to vary note length to emphasize some notes in a phrase, again often emphasizing more harmonically-important notes over passing tones, adding musical clarity to the bass part.

Again, sometimes a “keyboard bassist” will tend to play a series of bass notes that all run one into the next, or a series of short notes that all have the same duration.

This is one of the ways a player can group notes into phrases, and alternate strongly-accented notes-like maybe the notes of the current chord-with softer-played imbetween notes-passing tones-that can add extra movement to the bassline without clashing with the chords in other parts.Īnother important aspect of performance is note duration. Often a producer playing a bass part on the keyboard or programming one in will tend to clearly articulate each note-keyboards lend themselves to this, since striking a key is the only way to trigger a note.īut a bass player will employ different methods of articulating notes: assuming standard playing technique (as opposed to a slap bass performance), some notes will be plucked, either with fingers or a pick, but the player may also utilize hammer-ons and pull-offs, and short slides, both of which will result in notes with a different, softer attack characteristic than regular plucked notes. Phrasing is a key aspect of any bass part-not just to make it sound like what a bass player would likely play, but to make the part more musical in general.

Here are a few suggestions for creating basslines that sound like a “real” bass player. If a musician or producer is crafting a virtual bass part that’s meant to sound like a real bass, there are a number of techniques that can be employed to make the virtual performance-whether played in realtime or programmed in-sound more like a part that a dedicated bass player might have laid down on his instrument. Though it’s easy enough to record a real electric bass part via a DI and then pump it up with virtual amps and compressors, a lot of bass tracks are created with virtual synths or sampling instruments.

Scarbee pre bass slide