INVESTIGATE FUNK BASS PLAYING

Welcome! In all my years of teaching, the one style that students associate most with flashy bass playing is funk. Thanks largely to a number of pop bands who drew heavily on funk ideas and grooves such as Level 42 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we have this idea that funk is a style that hangs on the virtuosity and extravagant dexterity of the bass player.

Though important in many kinds of music, in funk, the lock between the bass and the drums is elevated to an art form all of its own

However, even a cursory journey into purer forms of funk, into the bands that effectively invented the style and developed it from the various groove innovations happening in soul music in the Sixties, shows us that there’s a huge technical range in what bassists bring to funk music, so there’s room for us in a beginner column to start thinking about what we can bring to the party when starting out with a less auspicious bag of technical tricks.

Without disappearing down a Cultural Studies rabbit-hole, funk is best understood as a feel or an orientation towards groove, rather than an expression of complexity. Many, though not all, funk grooves rely on specifically