How to Play Classical Music on the Upright Bass Guitar: Free Online Music Lesson

Video Transcript

I’m Branson Garner on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today we’re going to be talking about playing the bass, specifically playing the classical music style. The double bass has been used often to play that. The double bass is considered the backbone of the orchestra; it holds up the bottom end. So to start off, we talked a little about the bow before. The bow is used mainly in classical music. It’s a style called arco. To do that, just relax your arms, move your hands in a gentle motion like that, to get the best sound out of your instrument. When playing scales or anything like that, you can do them by either staccato, or if you want to get a more fluid playing style, you can connect those together using the bow, which sounds really good. Another technique that’s used in classical music is without the bow; it’s a technique called pizzicato, which is basically playing with your fingers. Bassists sometimes shift between arco and pizzicato playing. To do this, it’s a little bit different than say jazz musicians, using their right hand; they’re more down here, whereas pizzicato is a little lighter. It’s not as fluid a playing style with your fingers, and so this what it would sound like. You just put your hand almost perpendicular to the fretboard, or the fingerboard, and then just play, pluck away. That’s the pizzicato playing style. Alright, once you get those techniques down, playing classical music, you can look at a chart and play what you want. This is a little Beethoven. That is classical playing style.

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