How to play slap bass

If you don't know him, Stuart Clayton is from England and has written a load of bass books - including five (count 'em!), yes five transcription books on the guy who made slap really popular in the 80s - Mark King.

This book is around 220 pages long and comes with 2 CDs as well. The book takes you from the basics of the slap style right from playing simple slaps only to playing complex, 16th note orientated double thumb lines in the style of Victor Wooten and others.

The book also includes some interviews with the prime movers int he slapping field - Victor Wooten, Marcus Miller, Stuart Hamm, and also with some names you might not be so familiar with - eg Ray Riendeau and Adam Nitti. There's a detailed discography too.

But the meat of this book is in the tuitional material covered. The author starts with the real basics, adds pops to the slaps, hammer-ons and pull-offs, looks at some popular scales for slapping, and then quickly moves onto more advanced topics: such as 16th note slap grooves, left hand slaps, double stops, machine gun triplets and the technique everyone wants to nail: double thumb.

One of the really cool things about this book is that from Chapter 6 onwards, Stuart Clayton includes a list of songs that give real world examples of the techniques he's talking about. If you get hold of these songs, and get them down really good, you'll soon be funking up a storm.

This is THE best place to start if you want to learn to slap. The only criticism I can find is that Stuart hasn't filmed any video examples that he could post for people to actually WATCH (but that's kind of a tough criticism, it is a book and CD pack after all!)

If you want to slap, buy it.

Click here to read a more detailed review of Ultimate Slap Bass

Funk Bass by Chris Kringel is similar in many ways to Ultimate Slap Bass by Stuart Clayton. Though it's not quite so detailed, or so comprehensive (90 odd pages, compared to 220 or so in Ultimate Slap Bass).

But I've included it in this list for one reason, and one reason only.

Songs.

If you check out my website at all - how to play bass - you'll know that I don't like the approach to teaching that sees endless teaching and learning of scales and arpeggios by rote. Instead I like to see the bass taught by concentrating on the mechanics (the techniques ) and then applying those techniques to real world examples (ie songs).

Well that's just the approach that Chris Kringel takes here with slap bass. He starts off nice and simple - in fact in the early pages he has a great technique building tip, which is to take easy basslines that you know anyway, and play them slap style instead of fingerstyle (or pickstyle).

The book's USP is that for each section you go through, the author provides at least one bassline and on the CD that goes with the book you get a backing track that YOU can play along to (once you've learned the line of course).

There's a wide range of songs used too, for example the Chilli's version of Higher Ground, Sex in a Pan by Victor Wooten, a bit of Marcus (Love and Happiness), and more.

This is worth buying - if only to give yourself more practice material as you go through Stuart Clayton's book.

Click here to read a more detailed review of Funk Bass

This was the first serious slap DVD - it was first published in the early 90s on VHS. But it's made the transfer to DVD. And it's well worth getting.

It doesn't offer much material that's different from what you will have already covered in either Stuart Clayton's book, or Chris Kringel's book. What it does offer is a different perspective - you get to SEE how it all looks when put together.

Alexis Sklarevski may look a bit nerdy, but he knows what he's doing - and he knows how to teach it too. So this is definitely worth using in conjunction with the Clayton/Kringel books above.

The package was put together by a company called Video Progressions, and they've put together some good bass DVD instructional programs down the years (Fingerstyle Funk with rocco, a tapping one, and this one too.

There are some good examples in a band context which are pretty cool! Sklarevski also looks at some advanced techniques that aren't covered by Stuart Clayton - flamenco style strumming, John Entwistle style 'typewritter tapping' on the strings and some other cool stuff.

The ONLY thing wrong with this DVD is that - as it was filmed in the early 90s - there is no section on the double thumbing technique that all of today's top slappers use (and abuse!).

Even with that understandable omission, this is a great DVD and you should definitely be using it as you work through Stuart's book.

Click here for a more detailed review of The Slap Bass Program

Slap It! by Tony Oppenheim was the first real slapping book on the market. Before that, about the only material there was on slapping - in the UK anyway - was VHS copies people had made of an episode of a show called ROCK SCHOOL featuring a guy called Henry 'King Thumb' Thomas.

Anyhow, the original copy of Slap It! was back in the day before tab, before CDs even. I bought my copy back in '82 or 83 - originally all the examples came on two floppy plastic pseudo-records, not even tapes. I think I've still got those bits of pretend vinyl too, somewhere.

Anyway you should get Slap It! once you're about half way through Stuart Clayton's book. There's little in Slap It! about technique, it's mostly just grooves. And mostly either sixteenth note grooves or shuffle grooves.

Again this was written in the day before double thumping. But it's get some grooves with double stops, and some pretty cool grooves. Your job is to use it as material to work on, adapting the grooves to fit whatever section of Stuart Clayton's book you're working on - DON'T FORGET TO TRANSPOSE THE GROOVES TO OTHER KEYS! This is essential. A lot of the book's grooves are in E, and sound cool. In the real world you gotta play in other keys too.