Alesis NanoBass, Справочное руководство

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NanoBass Reference Manual
5: CREATIVE TIPS
Those of you familiar with my monthly “Creative Options” essay in Keyboard
magazine know that my take on the world is somewhat different than most folks.
Please read the following with that in mind. There are a ton of books out there
which will teach you how to play bass, and write good solid bass lines. But when
you want to take that one step further and make your work really personal,
you’re going to have to go a little further out on the limb...
Fair warning. This is not about slurs, slides, slaps, scales, or signal-processors,
except indirectly. It is not about the “how-to” of bass lines, but the “what-to,” and
— more importantly — the “why-to.”
A good bass line can’t hide, can’t slide to one side or another of the point, can’t
tell anything but the simple truth. It can’t distract or dissemble. It can’t, in fact,
play by any of the rules of Proper Behavior that human beings use to grease the
friction of everyday life. That doesn’t mean it has to be aggressive and forward;
but it can never be polite.
It’s the nature of the beast. Pianists can hide a multitude of sins behind chord
clusters, arpeggiations, blitzkrieg runs, and over-pedaling. A stumped sax player
can squeal, squawk, and roar his way out of a musical cul-de-sac like a drunk
brawling his way out of a bar. Violinists can pretend to be fiddlers. Drummers
can sweat with great drama and bash out seizures, rockslides, or both. None of
these are really thrilling, any more than jelly donuts are really tasty, but putting
up with players who do things badly is the price we pay to have the Chopins and
Coltranes who did them well. It is the depressing flipside of technique that
pyrotechnics can be used to blow some pretty thick smokescreens. On the bass,
however, there are fewer ways to fake it, and tricks which would be easy outs on
other instruments become dangerous traps. That trivial three-chord Telecaster
chucka-chucka? Mud on an electric bass; virtually impossible on an upright.
Speed-of-light piano arpeggiations? Messy, indistinguishable, fret-noise-plagued
blurs. The relentless arena-style backbeat of a gated snare? Boooooooooring.
Thus, the bass: low in range, limited in timbre, unwieldy to the hand. Thank
goodness. Because when those hard limits are pushed by someone who knows
how, extraordinary things happen.
What it comes back to is the difference between “how” and “what.” Between
saying something...anything...and actually having something to say.