Strength and Intonation Now. Speed Later.

I’m spending most of my time on the acoustic bass because that’s where I am the most rusty. I’m focusing on two things mainly, and they are both about the left hand.

First of all, I’m consciously using the tips of my fingers and not the pads. I was bad about that in the old days and I’m working on making proper position more intuitive from the start. Like any stringed instrument, fingers should form half of a hexagon when holding down a note. Think of the cells in a honeycomb in a beehive— (shout out beehiiv my current employer, and where this newsletter is hosted!)— the hexagon is the strongest structural form found in nature and our fingers can also reflect that kind of strength.

That seems simple but it can get weird with the pinky and then things get really kinky when I start adding in things like barres and hammer-on/pull-offIs. I’m trying to make it second nature to recover instantly to proper fingering technique. This will ultimately pay off in terms of speed and stamina but for now it is kind of a slog.

And also, ouch. These muscles haven’t seen this kind of use in the last 28 years and the calluses are pretty lightweight right now also. That muscle at the base of my thumb is going to turn into a golf ball by the time I’m done, I remember that from before.

The other thing is intonation. I’m listening hard hard hard to make every note in tune. Playing the melody on Round Midnight is great practice for this. This tune is in the amusing key of Gb, so with six flats there are just a few open strings involved, just a couple to check tuning against. Also the melody and comp chords range from a low F on the E string in the bridge section up to a high Gb on the G string so notes all up and down the instrument.

Come Together by The Beatles is another good one for intonation check against open A and E and D strings. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is a great intonation check in F minor (4 flats) that ranges up and down the fingerboard. None of these tunes is particularly fast. All of them are tricky in certain ways for intonation and strength.

And I’m playing the Precision a lot too but less than the upright. I was thinking about a tune Sammy and I used to play called Diving Duck. I couldn’t find the version I remembered though. Forty years later it occurs to me that Sammy may have just made up a bass line on the spot and told me to play it. I did though find a Johnny Winter version of it that was close enough to what I remember and I picked that up real quick. I played it for Claudia and she said that I looked and sounded like I was being reunited with an old friend. Which of course is true. It’s been almost as long since I played the P as since I played an upright. This bass sounds as good as I remember but I still chafe at the little bit of fret noise because I don’t have total control of the left hand, and how I am not… quite… in the pocket because I am just not yet precise enough in my playing with either right hand or left hand. Patience is required. I never make my move too soon.

I don’t care about playing fast right now. I’ll get to that later. Left hand now, I’ll get to the right hand later. And in the meantime there is other weird stuff going on with how I hold my body. I’m having to consciously relax my face muscles, and my shoulder muscles. A couple of tunes I play just to relax are Rio de Janeiro Blue and the old Peter Green Fleetwood Mac tune Oh Well.

I like the word ‘discipline’ for this kind of work. There is a sense in which it is tedious, to play the same figures over and over, paying attention to how my body is working with the instrument and how my ears are working with my body, and NOT paying attention to how to get the song across to an audience. That part will come but y’know, I never make my move too soon.