Slap bass was invented by Larry Graham in his mothers band Sly & The Family Stone when the band didn't have a drummer. Larry tried to duplicate the drums on his bass. He would slap the string with his thumb to emulate a bass drum and pop the string with his finger to emulate a snare drum. Since then many bassists have took this style and made it there own like Les Claypool, Louis Johnson, Flea, Victor Wooten and many more.
Slapping and Popping
Now I know this isn’t the easiest topic to discuss, as it’s hard to getting the point over through text, but I will try my best and see what you make of it.
Now the first thing is when practicing slapping for the first time I recommend only practicing it for no more than 10-15 minutes each day, or when you feel your thumb start to hurt just a little bit. Keep repeating this for the first week or so, because if you don’t your thumb will start to hurt a lot, and blister, and you may be not be able to practice it then for a week or two, so you will loose time trying to recover. As you practice it day by day your thumb will gain harder skin and you will be able to play for longer.
Now lets begin. To start with there are two ways to slap. One way is where you slap on the boney bit of your thumb and you hit the string with your thumb facing downwards. Even though this technique is easiest to pick up I am not going to teach you this way. The simple reasons are that it can be messy, as you have to mute the strings you don’t want to hit, and also it’s hard to get it precise, and the other reason is that the other way when learnt correctly is more efficient and you can go twice as fast as this technique.
Now this technique is called double thumb slapping, because as you hit your thumb down the string you hit it on the way up as well. You are getting two hits but with the other one you would only get one hit. This technique was mastered by Victor Wooten who invented this to my knowledge.
Slapping
You want to hit the string with the end of your finger (the fleshy bit near the end of your nail, not the hard boney bit), as you do on the other slap. Now let’s start on the E string. You want to hit the E, and land on the A, so you go thought the E to land on the A. Your thumb wants to be parallel to the strings and you want to twist your wrist downwards (towards yourself) with your thumb. Your thumb should remain loose and move with your wrist, as you hit the strings. Your arm should remain straight, and only move, as you move down the strings. When you've landed on the A string you want to leave your thumb there. You don't want to bounce off the string but instead go through the E to land on the A. Now at first you won't get this, and you will get really frustrated, but it will come. It took me several months to get it properly so just keep with it. When you land on the A string you want to bring your thumb up thought the E, so the string comes in contact with your nail. Twist you wrist upwards with you thumb and your thumb should catch under the string a little, and pop the string. It’s like popping with your thumb but just not as hard. This technique is referred as like using a pick where you alternate. Hopefully with practice you will get this.
At first you want to practice just hitting the string downwards on every string, and when you master this a little hit the strings up and down one at a time on every string. Now try skipping strings. For the first few week you may still be trying to just get the slap itself, and combining the up and down together, but it doesn’t matter how long it takes as it is a new technique, so its going to be hard to learn. Just think how good it will sound when you’ve done it. It will be worth it. Now when you finally get it down try different patterns:
2 downs and 1 up.
2 downs and 2 ups just mess about with it.
The popping
I can safely say this is the easiest part of the slapping technique. All you do is use your index and middle finger in turns to grab the strings from underneath, but only a little though, and pull and let go. The strings should come off the fret board and hit back against the fret board and make a popping sound. Thats it. Now do this with the other finger, and keep doing this over and over again on different strings. Now try one finger on one string, and the other finger on another. You should get this quicker then slapping itself.
You can either practice the two techniques slapping, and popping as two different techniques, or combine them straight away, and learn them together. That's what I did, as you can practice the octave pattern which is used a lot in slap.
The tab above is an octave. An octave is two notes that are the same note just an octave a part.
The 1 is an f.
The 3 is an f.
When you hear them you will tell that it is the same note just an octave apart. Octaves always go like this. Try fretting a note anywhere on the fret board, now miss a string then move 2 frets along, and keep you fingers on both of the frets. This same position can be played anywhere on the fret board. So now randomly use octaves to slap the:
first note then pop the second
first note twice then pop second
do variations of the two like this.
G|---------------------------------|
D|------3--------3------3------3|
A|---------------------------------|
E|--1-----1--1-----1-----1--1-|
You can do many variations of an octave anywhere.
three downs and a pop.
slap and two pops on the octave.
I am going to put a tab here which is a good slap song to learn first, as it includes all octaves.
Red hot chili peppers-higher ground
|--------------------------|---------------------------|
|-----2-------5-----7----|-----2-------5---7------|
|--------------------------|---------------------------|
|-0-0---0-3-3---5-5---|-0-0---0-3-3---5---5-|
This is just the intro but listen to it as its a good song to learn.
Hopefully now you know how to slap, or eventually you will. Now you need to listen to people and bands that use this technique such as red hot chilli peppers, Larry Graham, or Primus just to name a few people.
