The Groove — the heartbeat of any bass player. It’s the most important concept to wrap your head around, and also one of the toughest to get right. A solid Groove is all about delivering a consistent sound and feel. It’s about hitting the right notes, playing with the correct tone, keeping in time, and striking the perfect balance between playing too little and playing too much. Learning to play with a great Groove is something you can do — it just takes practice.
Like a heartbeat in a musical arrangement, the bass guitar line sets the rhythmic beat of any piece of music. When you play a bassline “in the pocket”, you give the listener a sense of the timing and feel of the music that gets their heart and their hips moving. A true bassist knows that “groove” goes beyond just playing the correct notes on beat, but also playing with the swing and the pocket of the drummer so that you’re both always “on the money” together. If you want to improve your bass playing, the best place to start is to listen to the drummer and the lead instruments to get a feel for where the pocket is, and where your line should sit in relation to theirs. When you play with great groove, you can lift yourself out of the amateurish, noodly type of playing that goes over like a lead balloon and instead provide a musical experience to your audience.
Improving your groove is something that you need to work on daily. You need to get a metronome and practice playing along to subdivisions, feeling the gaps between the notes more so than just racing through the chord changes. Experiment with playing along to backing tracks from different styles of music and how your playing can change subtly with slight alterations in attack and release. Work on it regularly, as with each passing day your muscles are adjusting and developing a new sense of how to respond to changes in dynamics so you no longer have to think about it. With time, this will develop your sense of groove and the ability to play lines that don’t necessarily just follow the chord, but really add to the emotion and feel of the song.
Next, I would add a fourth key to locking down a groove – the physical relationship with the instrument. Using your fingers to pluck or slap the strings are integral in producing the correct tone and rhythmic snap in a groove. Work on where you place your hands on the instrument and how you mute the strings to minimize the extraneous sounds. A second physical element to think about is how you hold your body and breathe during practice and performance, for preventing exhaustion and strain. This relationship enables us to develop our emotional connection to the bass in our practice of playing.
One more thing: Groove lives on history. The fact that Jamerson or Jaco Pastorius played the way they played means we have an example of how groove works in a soul ballad or in a jazz fusion. Sometimes when we transcribe these basslines it is useful to see how the phrasing works, how the syncopation works regardless of the style. And when we write our own music, we can always recall that way of playing that we learned. It’s really important to have history as a reference because the more we learn from the past the more we will write our own basslines. The more we will write our own signature grooves.
Once groove is internalized, that means it’s automatic, and so that frees you up to focus on other things when playing with a band. Most importantly, having an internalized sense of groove is what will allow other musicians to complement you, thus creating a unified band sound. That will make playing gigs with your band more enjoyable, and will also help you continue to improve your timing and feel, because you will be able to gauge your rhythm by the way other members of your band respond to it. For a serious bass player, few things could be more enjoyable and satisfying than knowing that the foundation of the music rests on your shoulders. So if you follow through with that, and learn how to play with groove, you will always have it to rely on.