Bass Lesson 3 Playing Fast

A lot of people say that if you want to learn to play fast, you must practice playing slowly. There is nothing against playing slowly, it is often very useful to examine how you use your fingers and to listen to your sound. Maybe you are doing something wrong and playing slow will clarify what you need to change. But if you want to learn to play fast, you must also practice by playing fast. Why? In the first place your brain has to get used to it, in the second place you must learn to relax while playing fast and in the third place you have to develop new techniques for your fast playing.

1. The faster you play, the quicker you are playing new notes, so you will have to decide very quickly which new notes to play. In fast tempo’s, combined with complex harmonies, I sometimes get the feeling I have to make many decisions at the same time. Maybe this is no problem at all for you, but my brain had to get used to new (higher) tempo’s. I used to practise with a metronome for this, or I used Band-in-a-box which I still do. I pretended that every tick of the metronome is the second and fourth beat of a 4/4 measure and practice a quick tune I felt like playing, just playing the harmonies or playing a solo.One week i would put the metronome on 145. The next week, I would go to 150.

You ask a lot of yourself when playing fast, so it is very easy to get tense. The tenseness in your fingers will disappear when you learn to relax in your head. I believe that the biggest source of tension while playing are your unconscious beliefs that you’re not able to do this, that it is much to difficult for a bass player like you, that you’ll never learn this, and other terrible thoughts of failure that we use to terrorize ourselves with. These thoughts create tension, which makes it impossible to play like you want to play. If you want to learn to play fast, you’ll have to relax consciously while doing it. Use your practise tome to learn to relax.

If you terrorize yourself a lot with this kind of thoughts, it may be a good idea to learn a technique called affirmation. Read more on the subject of relaxation in Lesson 1 Relaxation.

How do you want your fast notes to sound? Staccato, like a machine gun? Legato? With a clear attack? All of these ways? You’ll have to find solutions for all of your problems and to develop new techniques. The only way to do this is practicing fast.

I mainly use 2 techniques and the only difference lies in my use of the left hand. The first technique is a staccato way of playing. Right before playing the next note, I lift my finger and let it rest on the string. This means that for a fraction of a second, you hear nothing. If you do this quickly, it feels as if your fingers dance. This way of playing fast sounds more rhythmical and clear, and is more spectacular than the second, legato way of playing.