Introduction

Singing while playing bass is a challenge, albeit a worthwhile one. There is a tendency for those who are new to this art to speed up their bass line when they start singing. The reason for this is that your brain is excited about trying this new venture out and it seems to take a while for the correct neurons to connect properly. Having played been a singing bass player (and closely watched many others, including Paul McCartney, Jack Bruce, Chris Squire and Greg Lake), I’m excited about being asked to write this article. It covers my thoughts on the subject in as succinct a way as I can put it.

Your Choice

If you’re starting out as a bass player, or if you’re switching from another instrument and you want to sing, you have a choice to make. You can either have fun working at becoming good at singing/playing or you can look amateurish standing on stage. If you’re reading this website (and this article) it sounds like you’ve made the right choice.

For you, there has to be some guiding standard; an inner spark and desire to be good at combining the two and – equally importantly – staying on the beat. The desire might well come from the drummer you’re playing with who should expect you to stay on the beat and be able to play and sing as well. The desire might come from a drive for excellence on your behalf. It might come from the knowledge that if you fall off the beat, if you speed up while singing, you’re going to suck right in front of your audience. How many times have I seen a bass player do that? Well, not real often, but when I do, I think to myself,
“Here’s a bass player who has decided not to work to become professional”.
Hopefully you don’t want people saying this about you.

EXERCISES

Two vital things about playing bass and singing are, 1) Getting to know every note on the neck of your bass without looking and 2) Learning how to play in rhythm along with a drummer while singing. Following are some exercises you might want to try.

1. Find a song that has a driving bass line and a vocal that you want to sing. One of the first songs I learned to play and sing was the Beatles’ Hey Bulldog. Later, in the eighties, Addicted To Love was that song for me. It’s a good one to practice to. If you can master playing and singing that along with a drummer (or the CD), you’ll be able to sing a lot of other songs. Green Day has a lot of songs that are a challenge to play and sing. Find ones that you like, songs that challenge you, and learn how to do them.
2. Practice singing 12-bar blues with a walking bass line while singing. Play heavy and make the bass line walk all over the neck – up and down – not just follow established bass walking patterns. The important thing is not to get stuck only playing in E or A. What if you get in a horn band? Better practice Bb. And best to practice in all keys….every one of them.
3. A great exercise to get to know the neck without looking is to pick a note, any note and then find that note on the neck in four places. Go through every note by fifths (i.e. start with E, B, F#, C#, Ab, Eb, Bb, F, C, G, D, A). Find four notes quickly for each note. If you can’t find one, stop and locate them then start the exercise from that note. Do this without looking at the neck.
4. If you can get a drummer to spend time helping you out, play (while singing) with that drummer for hours on end. Have the drummer listen carefully to your rhythm and if you fall off his/her beat in any way, have them do something to let you know. Back in the day I did this with my drummer brother for hours. It was effective because out of some sort of pride I would not want the guy to let me know I was falling off the beat. That caused me to stay on the beat out of anguish.

You may well come up with exercises that work better for you.

In the end, the idea is to get to where you’re not thinking of the bass part so much, but of your vocal performance. What you’re singing is what most people catch on to; what you’re playing on bass should be coming naturally if you’ve prepared.

This is not a source for tips on “how to write a song”, although interviewees will be asked how they write songs, whether they write songs on the bass, etc. Courses on Songwriting are quite imposing, aren’t they? How can somebody teach other people how to express themselves?

This is also not a source for tips on “how to play <instrument> by ear.”  Courses which claim to do so present a curious pedagogical conflict.  Are there any courses on the following topics?

• “How to inhale and exhale”
• “How to write ambidextrously”
• “How to stand on your head”

Or even more extravagantly with Expert-Advice?

• “How to ride a bike, taught in 23 lessons by Lance Armstrong”

I suppose that developing such curricula is possible if you can convince people of their need for such advice, but…. Such topics are either so self-evident, or the ratio teaching/learning is so immense, that endeavoring to publish a method on them seems impossible.

Thus, the Singing Bassist is restrained to topics on fine-motoric coordination for playing the bass-guitar while singing.

The Guitar-Strumming Singer-Songwriter often merely needs to strum a few standard chords which accompany his or her vocal-melody in order to proclaim the birth of a new song. Guitars, and especially Acoustic Guitars, are lovely chordal instruments, supplying six notes with each and every upstroke (and with each downstroke). In some ways, the six-stringed guitar simulates an entire band in and of itself, the strumming pattern supplying percussion, the deeper three strings providing the emotive bass-frequencies, and the higher three strings accompanying the vocal melodies. Writing demos for a band on an acoustic guitar is a logical choice, because the strumming pattern plus vocal melody sets out the parts for all of the band members. In more ways, songwriting with an acoustic guitar is TOO easy.

The songwriting singing-bassist must endure longer journeys in birthing new song. Donning the cape labeled “Vocalist”, he or she begins a song with a rhyme or poem set to melody. Maybe this melody is accompanied by a chordal instrument such as a piano or a six-stringed guitar during the first months after conception. Donning the bassist hat, the chordal accompaniment is filled-in or adorned with an expressive bass-line that must simulate and even replace the chords with an ornate string of single notes. And wait, low and behold, this concatenation of single notes must in some way fit with the often frenetic participation of a drummer!

Once the bass-line is invented, the two sometimes contrapuntal, often completely dissociate compositions for the Vocals and for the Bass-Guitar must be united for the end-product of the singing-bassist, which is the schizophrenic “song and dance” of performing a completed song. One quickly sees that the gestation period for a song written by a singing-bassist is necessarily longer than that for a song written by a singing-guitarist. However, the singing-bassist probably acknowledges and embraces this fact, much in the same way certain connoisseurs prefer aged wine to recent swill, or home-cooking to fast-food. A slow brew ensures a deep character.

It must be mentioned that certain singing-bassists elect to outsource the authoring of vocals.

• Jack Bruce collaborated with lyricist Pete Brown in Cream
• Rush is a Canadian rock band … composed of bassist, keyboardist, and lead vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.

In these band formations one quickly perceives that the songwriter views himself primarily as a composer and performer. Possibly the topic of the song’s text is mutually agreed upon between lyricist and vocalist, but then the singing-bassist is tasked with weaving his bass-work together with the work of his lyricist (and furthermore with the drummer of his band).

The case-study of Rush could become a doctoral thesis about the consummate singing-bassist, and not in the least because of the fact that it is the drummer who authors the lyrics for the singing-bassist. Does Neil Peart strive for creating non-intuitive vocal rhythms to propel Geddy Lee to ever-increasing feats of musical coordination? Many open questions for interviews….. In any case we are overwhelmed with the impression that Rush always strives to “keep it in the family“.

Returning back to the point of this post, I speculate that songwriting for singing-bassists is more time-consuming because of the fact that it is more all-encompassing.

The autobiography of Suzi Quatro, the first female Rock Singing-Bassist. This fine read is entitled Unzipped
and it details her rise from suburban Detroit to commanding the stages as a Singing-Bassist around the world. She is very representative of a time when playback was non-existent, and when instrumental virtuosity was a paramount feature in the career of every musician. I zone out watching her performances on youtube wondering where all those notes came from and then realizing that they all emanate from that 5’1″ girl in the leather jump suit with a bass-guitar looking too big for her frame! To my knowledge she was also the first Singing-Bassist as a solo-act. Meaning, although she most likely could have recruited a bass-guitarist to perform for/with her, she opted to keep playing and singing.

I read this book as a source of general research on singing bassism, and found the following anecdotes of particular relevance:

• Suzi plays piano, guitar, percussion and bass-guitar
• she was urged to play bass-guitar at the age of 14 by her sister Patti for their groundbreaking group (as an all-female rock band), The Pleasure Seekers, whose rotating lead-singer position meant that Suzi became a Singing Bassist at the same time as becoming a bassist
• started on a wide-necked Fender Precision bass, then switched to a smaller necked guitar and experienced large leap in capability
• first record deal with the Pleasure Seekers at 14 years old, then recording one song as lead-singer
• states that her proficiency on the bass-guitar was obtained in a follow-up group, the jam-band Cradle, which featured instrumental-solos often exceeding 5 minutes in duration. Played mostly festival appearances in the US midwest.
• whisked off to England by producer Mickie Most to start her solo career at the age of 20. Kept playing the bass-guitar for her solo career!
• Often recorded as a Band in the Room, singing and playing bass-guitar
• Of all the hundreds of songs she has performed, Suzi needed practice in order to sing and play only one song in her entire career as a Singing-Bassist!
• Writes Songs on Piano, and occasionally performs live on the Piano

Unzipped is a fascinating account of how a normal suburban girl-next-door becomes a bass-guitar playing band-leader, owning the songs, owning the stage, owning her crowd. Suzi opened the door for instrument-playing rocker-girls, and did that all the while playing the bass and singing, bravo!

This post is a compilation of all of the Autobiographies or semi- Autobiographies from which one can glean some goods on “how they do it”, they being, the expert Singing Bassists:

• Sting – Broken Music
• Paul McCartney – Many Years From Now
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• Suzy Quatro – Unzipped
• Lemmy Kilmister – White Line Fever
• Jack Bruce Composing Himself: The Authorised Biography
• Glenn Hughes : The Autobiography
• Kiss and Make Up – Gene Simmons
• No Certainty Attached – biography about Steve Kilbey

The reader will see how much of a “non-issue” the topic of singing-bassism is for these autobiographers. They really don’t see it as a topic of interest to their readers. But then again, the remainder of their lives has been quite fascinating, so its a difficult choice of priorities. We are indeed a small niche who are fascinated by the singing-bassist aspects!

In a typical pop-rock band,

the singer and guitarist collaborate closely, and

the bassist and the drummer collaborate closely.

The guitarist and the singer take turns coming to the fore in the performance. For example, it is rare that a guitar solo is played during the singing of the verse. Classic pop-rock bassistry dictates that the bass-guitar and the drummer operate together, that the drummer’s kick drum and the bassist’s notes are together. The green lines in the following diagrams indicate which players are “best-friends”, indicative of the most intense collaboration. Here is the situation in a classic meat-and-potatoes four-piece band:

We see that there are essentially two autonomous bands operating within the four-piece band. One of these sub-bands is called “the rhythm section”, and consists of the bassist and the drummer. The other sub-band are the self-anointed “leads”, the “lead-singer” and the “lead-guitarist”. Notice that the songwriters could be hidden behind any of these performance monikers.

The Irish Rock Band U2 is a classic example of the four-piece “lead-singer and lead-guitarist” band.
The self-anointment among the “lead” section of U2 is accentuated by the fact that only the singer and the guitarists have pseudonyms (“Bono” and “Edge”), which attempt to amplify the mythology surrounding their personae. The rhythm-section retain their birth-names, which make them the more accessible, less glorified sub-band within U2. This duality has its advantages for the band, namely, that fans can find both idols and normal people in the same band. But the songwriting is vaguer and less unified, because there are in fact two bands playing on the stage!

The extreme case of the “leads-vs.-rhythm” band-configuration is that of the guitarist-led trio:

The cohesion of a guitarist-led trio is just as shaky as that of a conventional four-piece band, and the band must struggle to “fill in the (acoustical) gaps” because the same person must sing lead and play lead guitar. It is difficult for the fans to consider the band as a unit, because the most obvious impression is that of “the singing-guitar-wizard and his loyal drum’n’bass-minions”. Guitarist-led trios often opt to perform with a fourth musician on “rhythm guitar” or keys.

The bassist-fronted three-piece leaves no ambiguity as to who is in the driver’s seat. The bass-guitarist unifies the drummer with the singer and with the guitarist. The singer collaborates with the guitarist.
For the songwriter, the role of singing-bassist affords the maximum in unison and cohesion in performance.

credit: Elvire.R.

The Police, from England, are the ideal case-study in a bassist-led three-piece band. With the exception of less than five songs, their singing-bassist, Sting, wrote and composed all of the songs for the Police. In performance mode, Sting coupled the drummer and the guitarist into a highly cohesive single band.

The singing-bassist has larger control over the band’s performance than does any other member of his band or any member of any other band-configuration.

You can’t argue with a bass-guitar

– Steve Kilbey, The Church

An element of serendipity also exists which gravitates the roles of songwriter and singing-bassist together. Often, a songwriter inherits the bass-guitar, due to either the exile or resignation of the band’s prior bass-guitarist. However, emerging songwriters can opt to form stronger, more highly-cohesive bands, by performing as Singing-Bassists.

One remaining good reason for a songwriter to play bass and sing is that of accelerated band formation. A quick glance in the want-ads will reveal a surplus of guitarists. A songwriter who sings and performs on the bass-guitar only needs two further musicians to form a road-ready band.

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