Bass guitar is HARD. I wish I stuck with it in high school because I’m in prettyyyy bad shape with my theory. I’m trying to learn it again, little by little, but most of the time I’m just looking at tabs that other people have written and learning my favorite songs. I’ve been wanting to start transcribing them myself because honestly, most tabs on the internet suck, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Lately I’ve been insanely obsessed with Aqualung because it is quite literally the perfect song. But the best part of it all is the conversation between the bass (Jeffrey Hammond) and the electric guitar (Martin Barre) during the guitar solo. I can’t name another song where the bass line is that active during the guitar solo and still manages to be perfectly balanced to that degree. Anyways, what’s also great about this song is that the bass line (throughout all of it, not just the guitar solo) has the perfect blend of techniques that I need to work on as a beginner/somewhat intermediate player, like slides and quick plucking technique. I’ve been learning this song using Fusilli Jerry’s tab and cover on YouTube, which is helpful because it lets me slow down the video and really hammer in the technique and sixteenth note precision.
The famous initial riff is easy enough – although a bit of a stretch with my pinky to the B flat on the D string. The riff after that introduces a whole note slide, which, if you ask me, can be trickier than those more dramatic slides because it’s harder to enunciate that you’re actually sliding. That plus the shifts to the 11th and 13th frets were not trivial, but muscle memory served me well here. The rhythms were a little confusing but they’re critical since the guitar is playing the same exact rhythm; if you play it wrong you’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb.
Anderson’s gentle melodic acoustic guitar part begins (you know which part I’m talking about) and there’s a rest, but then we get an equally melodic bass line coming in. This is SO FUN TO PLAY. And then IT SPEEDS UP. The hardest part here is definitely the plucking and just getting your fingers on the frets fast enough. I can almost play the slow part at full speed but I’m a ways away from playing the fast part at full speed.
Then comes the buildup to the solo (double finger plucks on the eighth notes for added emphasis) and then the solo itself. It really is fast for a person at my level, and I still can’t really play it at full speed, but I’m getting there! Sometimes I sit there and just listen to it because it really is such a wonderful composition. From what I understand about theory, it seems that it’s just a ton of arpeggios played with eighth and sixteenth notes that perfectly complement everything else going on. I guess that’s the whole point of the bass line, but still… love to see it done well.
My goal is to be able to play this song at full speed and maybe record myself playing it with no stops. I honestly should be doing that now so I can see whether or not my grip/plucking looks wrong. One thing I noticed was that I’m resting my thumb on the E string when playing the other strings, which (I think) is just personal preference, but the added bonus is that I can develop that technique to mute the other strings for a cleaner sound.
Another added bonus is that my obsession with Aqualung opened the doors to discovering Jethro Tull’s other work-but that’s a topic for another post. Hopefully I can make some progress on this over the next few weeks while I juggle work and travel.
Okay thanks for reading bye!