"Why would you wan to sound like a bass, especially double bass, when the Stick is such a different beast?"

Because The Stick has a bass register. Or, as they say, because it's there. The bass line as a concept seems shrouded in mystery with much R&D applied to the shape of the bass line in jazz, fusion, rock and Latin genres. I like to think it's still in an embryonic stage just waiting to take definite form.

Walking bass is scalar but not always. Latin bass jumps in rudimentary root-five-octaves but with many exceptions. Advanced prog rock and fusion bands strive for the bass line as true counterpoint but no one can define or set the standards.

I relate to Stick bass in 5ths as a set of trap drums. There's the kick drum, snare and toms, and I use the outer high register strings to punch chords as part of the rhythm, that is, two note intervals to spell out the chord, either the easy barred 5th interval or the flatted 5th. These are my cymbals.

My feeling is, the bass line needs jumps and the 5ths tuning is good for that, but it also needs chromatic and scalar movement, so my hands are moving around a lot.

Maybe the state of the art drummer knows a lot about building the bass line of the future. If so, we have a veritable army of incredibly gifted and able "stick men".

Cool reply, I had to read it a few times. Thoughtful.

What a great summary of the directions on Stick!

Thanks for the inspiration Emmett.

i've always approached the Stick as lower-pitched percussive instrument. Thanks again, Emmett, for your insights and the coolest instrument IN THE WORLD

I'm so glad that you chimed in to answer that question, Emmett. I loved your response:I've heard some amazing walking bass lines from a tuba!--there's nothing intrinsic to bass guitar or upright bass with a walking bass line. Piano does it all the time (but I find it much easier on the Stick--at that's about 4 months of Sticking compared to 30 years of piano.)
I like to take MIDI drum lines and run them through instrument patches, so that the bass drums and snares and hi hat lines now trigger pitched bass notes or unique melodies when you transpose them around. Also, take piano melody and rhythm MIDI and feed it to the MIDI percussion track to make new, non-intuitive rhythms/patterns. Native Instruments REAKTOR will let you take audio percussive samples (usually--but not limited to--drums) and change the percussive hits to specific bass notes. That's how I made the basslines for Mutational Frequencies, a sampler-based tune (still in progress) created on NI's Maschine using Reaktor to generate basslines from drum samples. Here's an example of a song made entirely percussively, and then feeding that back to generate MIDI notes--a literal example of the metaphor Emmett was using (plus me "scratching" away on the Maschine.)

Hey SteveS, it's in C#, good key to get lost in. It's a drum solo with a "tribal" feel as the source of an orchestral song arrangement - theme and variation.

No end to the incredible talent of intuitive body math in the hands (and feet) of those drummers amongst us. Definitely a world resource waiting to be utilized one way or another. Let's hope it's for music's sake.

Thanks JefferyK, MartinP, KonradP and SteveS for getting the point I was trying to make. Put together a tuneful set of trap drums or percussion and you have a song. Electronically tweak each element for increased pitch definition and you have an orchestra. Play those drums and your have everybody dancing. (That's the whole point, ain't it?)

I think bass and drums have to come together in the hands of one performer in order to define the bass "line" of the future. With my inverse Stick 5ths, I'm working on it.

As a melodic piano player, I'd never deliberately written anything in C# (well, maybe C# minor), that wasn't written in D and then de-tuned or transposed. C# is not an "easy" key for piano. That was one of the immediate advantages of writing using samples to trigger other notes: the increased sonic and tonal pallette without regard to the piano performance paradigm of white and black keys (and why I immediately gravitated to the any-key-is-good, no-open-strings Stick).

You're also the first person to immediately notice the classical--almost sonata-like-- structure I'm using, with basically percussive theme 1 (and variations), percussive theme 2, and then the synthesis of the two together. I loved using a classical form with the tribal feel of the percussion, without a single "note" of melody that didn't come from a percussion line. It's really from the other side entirely of my musical brain. Thanks for the listening--and way more importantly--"getting" what I was trying to do here. That's always the best compliment!

Stick = Mini Orchestra. Yes, yes it does...

*Feverishly gets back to practicing..

I'm so thrilled that Emmett flew low to comment on our thread! Yes, the bass line on Stick has a unique future, what with using the high strings to accent the rhythm and harmony simultaneously. Greg Howard's been doing that for years, and I want to move in that direction, in a formulaic way (the older I get the more enamored I become with fusing style, procedure, form, sight-reading charts, and rhythmic integration into a musical whole).

I've got a long way to go, but I've made some progress in just the last few weeks. I'm still a whole lot better at sight-reading notes than I am at interpreting charts, but I'll get there.

Now the trick is to add right hand chords in go-to voicings (chords I can depend on grabbing at tempo).

Keep the thread alive guys! I learn something from every post.

R

Yes, this is one of my favorite techniques to use when playing bass parts on the Stick.

I discovered this (or really heard it on some record and emulated it) and really had one of my most important "aha" moments on the Stick in the last year. Being able to punctuate bass lines, even right hand melodies and chords, by hitting the occasional 4th, flatted 5th, 5th, 6th hammering really makes things sound great.