i’m slightly skilled at guitar & understand the instrument well enough to track bass for some songs i’ve worked on, but what i don’t have is any style or deeper understanding of what makes bass parts ‘work’.
Anyone have recommendations of what bassists in vkei they enjoy and why? also don’t be afraid to say Reita, i can easily feel i like the sound of, for example, The GazettE as a band, but couldn’t point out any aspects of Reita’s writing/playing that contribute to that. So even hearing why anyone likes well-known obvious picks for ‘great vkei bassists’ could be vv helpful to me!
I really like the way Toshiya cuts through the mix on Dir en grey songs. However, I’m unable to explain why what he does works so well or what he’s even doing.
For starting out, pretty much any song that has 80bpm is great, it’s super easy for beginners and when you feel like that’s easy, just move on to the next step. What I did was make a list of songs I liked with that bpm and went with that
I think you should go for J from Luna Sea in case you want more of that grassroots VK bass playing to inspire your further undertakings (both Toshiya from DEG and Reita from the GazettE are inspired by him somewhat).
TRUE BLUE is very beginner-friendly and also useful for learning that “upbeat VK bass picking”, cannot really think of more proper terms for that but you get an idea once you notice the bass.
Please do not hesitate to ask for more songs like this though.
The simplest key to write bass, i guess, is playing the root note and then run some other notes in scale to reach next root note.
Chorus from Shiver by The Gazette is example
i have some trouble to explain why I like some bassists and other aren’t in my spectrum of interest. I guess it’s all about tone of bass and visual apperance of musician. And yeah, Reita is my Idol to this day.
He adds a lot of melodic movement that often plays counterpoint to the guitars, and likes to play in between the rhythms of the guitars and the drums a lot. Something like Lotus is I think a good masterclass in what he does - the intro riff has the guitars in lockstep with one another and Shinya accenting certain guitar hits, but Toshiya in a very subtle way does NOT play certain guitar hits, and adds his own percussive hits when the guitars are holding a note for a moment
In the verse, Toshiya plays a sparse bass part that adds a whole new melody underneath what the guitars and vocals are doing. He leaves a lot of open spaces in between phrases, slowly adding more notes and closing those gaps as the verse goes on, giving this very calm section a subtle sense of forward momentum
It’s really only in the choruses and the heavy break where he locks in tight with the guitars, which imo makes those sections hit a bit harder as a result because now everyone is slamming those chords at the same time, making it all bigger. And even then there’s that crazy melodic fill he does halfway through the choruses
If you put literally any other bass player in DEG, you would change the band’s sonic chemistry at such a fundamental level it would feel entirely different, imo.
Idk how many vkei bassists I can really recommend, since that’s just not where a lot of my style comes from. I’m sure there’s plenty of people here who can add better suggestions than I on that front!
I suggest adding in some older soul/funk/R&B music into the rabbit hole dive, especially old Motown records that have James Jamerson and Carol Kaye playing on them. Both of them had a very melodic style, especially James with a lot of open notes added into his walking bass lines. Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ album is a great record to study, Nathan Watts’ bass on that entire album is stellar, especially the unison breaks in ‘Sir Duke.’ And more on the rock side, Tim Commerford’s playing in Rage Against the Machine was super influential for me, creating a ROCK FUCKING SOLID bridge between Tom’s guitars and Brad’s drum grooves
Huge thanks for this comment - ofc i knew Lotus well but this de-mysteriousized(??) the abstract concept of ‘it just works real good’
I played badly along w/ tabs for a bit and by the end of the day, i think i was able to make use of similar rhythmic phrasings to control the feel of the song i was recording for!
Ty for making sense of this for me - now i gotta go thru the rest of the suggestions too~
I say just pay more attention to the bass of your fav bands. Youll begin to see areas where they follow what the guitarists are doing. But you’ll also see where they stand out, especially when it doesn’t take away from the rest of the song.
And then…right then it’ll REALLY click on how the bass works.
And when you do get to that point of writing, start off by using some of the methods you picked up. And over time you’ll come up with your own style/method.
That’s where the fun begins. I ended up falling in love the bass so much that I ended up turning my guitar into a bass using plug ins before I got my actual bass.
And I refuse to leave a recording session without laying a bass track down that flows with the rest of what I’m doing.
This is probably some of the best advice anybody can give on this!! The bands and bassists that one particularly loves will always serve as the best inspiration fuel
