The style I have investigated in this assignment is solo bass, which is very broad and offers endless opportunities to experiment with genres and techniques, combine them in any way I like and hopefully bring something new and original to the instrument, which is exactly what I have strived to do in the portfolio shown.

In “Part 1” of the portfolio, one of the main objectives was to write a funky solo bass song in 11/8 to help me internalise the feeling of odd time signatures while also developing comfort and consistency with advanced techniques such as double thumbing and double pops (both falling under slap bass). The real challenge with this was combining this with a multitude of different techniques (palm muting, fingerstyle, harmonics, strums, tapping, hammer-ons, ect), transitioning between them smoothly, and doing all of this while staying in time and keeping a good feel. Another key objective was to get the style of Victor Wooten more ingrained into my playing, and I achieved this by taking inspiration from one of his more famous songs “you can’t hold no groove”, which contains a lot of musical elements that contribute to his sound. These elements include a percussive playing style that uses advanced slap bass techniques to fit with and weave around the groove, combining this with many techniques as mentioned above, and variation of complexity throughout the song when it comes to harmony, chord progression, technique, and how many parts are layered on top of each other. One way I apply these elements in this song is having a main variation of the main groove with a 1-1-4-6 progression, then another variation that stays on the 1 chord for dramatic effect, then I simplify the harmony even further on the solo break version to highlight the extra busy fills. Another example is after the solo break where I add 16th note strummed chords for a sense of drive towards the end, then add triplet strummed chords on top of that with a flat 2nd and flat 5th to really clash harmonically and rhythmically in order to add that extra tension to the crescendo towards the dead stop end, making it more dramatic. To further add to the tension buildup I made the 1 chord groove more repetitive than earlier in the song, added ambient harmonics to add overall fullness, and also added this messy slidey half triplet element (inspired by Victor Wooten performing with a looper at Berklee 2025) right at the end to really maximise the chaotic feeling before the relief of the sudden dropout.

In “Part 2″ of the portfolio I’m focused on incorporating chords into my solo bass playing, and applying them in conjunction with a melody; similar to how classical guitarists play. One of the main people pioneering this on the bass is Michael Pipoquinha, and one of his songs “O Auge do Amor” is my inspiration for this song. One thing he did which I really like in terms of the chordal harmony is that he’d use a lot of exotic sounding chords involving intervals such as the major 2nd/9th and/or 6th, and combine/invert these in creative ways that can really stretch your fretting hand technique, but blend all of that in with basic root-5th or 3rd chord patterns and relatively simple chord progressions, and this results in a very soothing piece of music that’s easy to listen to if done right, which was the main thing I wanted to achieve with my song here. Another Michael-inspired element I incorporated into this song was using the palm mute technique to play a bassline in conjunction with a pseudo drum part, loop some chords/harmonics over that, then play a solo over the whole thing, so I’m effectively mimicking a full band with solo bass, which was also one of my aims for this song.

In “Part 3” of the portfolio, I’m essentially taking advantage of how the pickups on the bass I’m using work, which each have a quad coil configuration that allow me to switch between a split coil (commonly seen on P-bass), single coil (commonly seen on jazz basses), and humbucker (commonly seen on musicman stingrays). The concept of this song is to keep switching between different pickup configurations and have what I play in each setting loosely mimic the style of a famous bass player who prefers to play the original type of bass that the given setting is loosely emulating. It ended up feeling like more of a compilation than a song, but the goal was to make the transitions between each section sound smooth and make sense musically so I could avoid the whole thing sounding completely random and disjointed. For the first part I went for a motown style using a lot chromatic notes inspired by James Jamerson with the P-bass setting, second was inspired by Victor Wooten playing a bassline, drums and melody at the same time using the “PJ” setting, 3rd was inspired by Marcus Miller doing a similar thing with the jazz bass setting, 4th was inspired by Jaco Pastorius with the 16th note percussive fingerstyle funk using the bridge pickup jazz bass setting, 5th was inspired by flea from red hot chilli peppers with a funky groove followed by a flashy slap bass solo using the musicman stingray setting, 6th was inspired by Charles Berthoud with the melodic 8 finger tapping using the single coil neck humbucker bridge setting, and the final part is inspired by Tosin Abasi (guitarist) from Animals As Leaders with the percussive double thumb in conjunction with the index and middle finger and complex rhythms using the double humbucker setting.

In “Part 4” of the portfolio, I’m investigating an advanced version of the tapping technique originally pioneered on the electric guitar by Eddie Van Halen, where I use all 8 of my non-thumb fingers to play pianistic ideas with 2 simultaneous parts that simply can’t be played on 1 bass guitar by any other means. The person who really pioneered this on bass is Charles Berthoud, and I learnt how to do this from his 2 handed tapping book, in which there are multiple etudes each designed to target a specific area of the technique, such as hand independence, tapped chords, pull-offs, emphasis on each hand etc, but there are certain areas that are constantly worked throughout (even though they all feed into each other). These areas include strengthening and incorporating the pinkie finger on the (usually) plucking hand, and the use of varied dynamics and tempo. It is also recommended to break the etudes down into chunks, practice them very slowly until 3 repetitions with no mistakes are achieved, increase the tempo slightly and repeat up to full speed, then repeat the process with bigger chunks, then work the entire piece up to speed (also not uncommon to isolate really small details that are causing problems and focus on just that for the time being). This is all very much inspired by how classical pianists traditionally learn, which is why it worked really well for this pianistic style of bass playing, and the practice method is something that I’ve actually taken and applied the best I can to pretty much everything on this portfolio and anything I generally find challenging to play as it is universally applicable to any musician classical or not. It is also a very helpful practice tool in classical piano to write and arrange your own pieces after learning the etudes, which is how Charles wrote the tapping book, and also why I made the arrangement of “you’ve got a friend in me” by Randy Newman shown in this part of the portfolio. I arranged it by listening to the original recording bar by bar, figuring out how a pianistic arrangement would work on bass, and jotting everything down in guitar pro to make it easier to come back and apply the practice method explained above 4 bars at a time, and so on. One thing I did slightly differently when practicing for this was putting a huge emphasis on playing the whole piece start to finish at a super slow tempo as this will force my fingers to be strong and accurate with positioning (especially the right pinkie), and standing up too for extra familiarity when the pressure’s on. In this performance I also segue into “classical thump” by Victor Wooten, which is another great example of how you can apply classical piano to bass. In this case this is achieved by using a combination of hammer-ons, pull-offs, and double thumb slap bass in conjunction with index and middle finger pops to play the fast pianistic arpeggio part as smoothly and efficiently as possible with the unique timbre that slap bass offers.

In “Part 5” of the portfolio, I experimented with the very unique ibanez ashula bass, which has a normal 4 string bass configuration conjoined with a fretless version of the top 3 strings all on one neck. I did this by writing a solo in which I inlcuded elements of call and response between the fretted and fretless parts, seamlessly transition between fretted and fretless in the middle of lines to use the timbre change as an effect, and play chords with a mixture of fretted and fretless for a unique texture.

The things that went well in this portfolio are that I’ve become better at practicing, which has improved my technique massively, and I’ve explored many areas of solo bass and become more well-rounded and creative as a result. In terms of what I could improve, I’ve noticed that I tend to get tense and nervous when performing and/or recording, so my next steps could be to practice relaxation until that becomes my natural response under pressure.