WorshipTraining

3

1. 
   Arthur Klassen said: On May 21, 2011

   Nice graphical tutorial! Still, it would be more helpful if shown on a four-string bass. In my 25 plus years of playing various instruments (acoustic&lead, piano, keyboards and bass) in various worship bands in various churches, I don’t know if I know more than two regular worship-band bass players who have a five-string bass.

   Myself, I regularly play with a DGCF tuned bass, so I can get some of those lovely low D notes on a slightly slimmer budget.

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2. 
   Jan K Hough said: On May 23, 2011

   Curious that the open strings are avoided in the song. Is this commonplace? I usually prefer the open strings as they are fuller sounding and easier on my left hand!

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3. 
   Arthur Klassen said: On May 23, 2011

   I’m not a professional bass player but I know of two reasons to avoid — or at least “un-prefer” — open strings.

   1. If you hook your bass guitar up to a tuner (preferrably a digital one since they tend to be a bit more responsive) and play a chromatic scale down from several frets up to the open string, you may notice that there is a significant difference in how close the fretted notes are to the “tempered true” tone your tuner will report between the fretted notes and the open ones (too much difference and it’s probably time to have your bass “set up” again — a local luthier will know what that means). And that’s one aspect of the different timbre an open string will give compared to a fretted one. And ask someone who wants to record and they’ll tell you that one thing that drives them crazy is inconsistent sound quality or levels from any one instrument across the whole song.

   2. A more important reason is about how big your hands are versus the fret spacing that far up the neck and what options would be open to you in moving from one note to another. Too much walking in the bass is another problem that you should be sensitive to your worship leader and to artistic sensitivities about, but you’ll notice that one feature that makes the tutorial above really cook is no- to low-stress walking strategies tastefully placed between different notes. Up around the fifth fret, distances to the different options are significantly less than back around the open string — especially for the jump from an open string to a semi-tone below.

   So while a nice booming open string has a sound that just asks to be used again and again (especially with worship songs in keys that use one of the open strings as the 1st of the chord, of which there are many), there are some reasons why not using them too frequently makes sense.

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