The double bass is the deep-pitched, resonant string instrument that holds down the bottom end in ensembles ranging from a Rockabilly or Psychobilly trio at a smoky dive bar to an elegant Tango band in a stylish Argentina nightclub, to a Classical Music concert at a fancy gala where Millionaire Playboy types and the socialite sip champagne. Different styles call the instrument different names. A blues band may call it an "upright bass"; a Country Music group might call it a "bass fiddle" or "doghouse bass", and a classical music performer might call it a "Contrabass". However, they all refer to the same type of instrument.
Double basses used in various styles and genres are made differently and look different. The bass has a big wooden body, a fretless neck, a carved wooden bridge holding the strings under tension, and metal tuning machines for changing the pitch. The typical tuning, from lowest to highest-pitched strings, is E, A, D, G. This is the exact same tuning as the electric bass and the relationships between pitches is like the lowest four strings on a guitar (except that the bass is an octave lower).
The bass typically uses metal strings, although some Rockabilly and Baroque performers use gut or nylon strings. Double bass strings are much thicker and heavier than regular guitar strings.
Double bass can be plucked with the fingers (pizzicato) or played with a bow, like cello or violin. In some styles, the bass is almost always plucked (Rockabilly, blues, psychobilly). In some styles, it is mostly plucked, but there is regular use of the bow (jazz). In two styles, the bass switches often between plucking and bowing (Classical Music and tango). In genres where the bass is played in bars and clubs, it is often amplified with a speaker cabinet. This includes Rockabilly, psychobilly, blues and pop-rock. In Classical Music and bluegrass, the bass is played acoustically (unless the bluegrass band is at a big venue).
Moods it Evokes
- A slow, sultry blues bassline on upright bass will evoke images of a smoky nightclub where the Femme Fatale and the Hardboiled Detective are drinking away their sorrows.
- A jaunty, bouncy jazz walking bassline, along with jazz drums, will make the listener think of a New York City jazz club in The '40s.
- A bassline in cut time on the deep root note and the fifth note of the chord below note makes the listener think of down-home, twangy Country Music, Rockabilly or Folk Music. Add a mandolin doing "chop chords" on beats two and four and Yee-haw, it's hoedown time!
- A Falling Bass line played with deep bowed upright bass will evoke a melancholy, funereal mood.
- A deep, sustained low note played with the bow, especially if done by a big bass section, can create a tension-inducing Drone of Dread. When the Redshirt rescue team arrive at the Ghost Ship or Gas Station of Doom and are looking around, a good way to foreshadow that they will all soon be splattered by something with claws/teeth is with a deep, ominous drone. Bonus points for layering on "Psycho" Strings with dark, dissonant harmonies.
Rockabilly, Psychobilly and Blues
If you go to a grungy bar in The City Narrows to see a psychobilly band, the upright bass will be a plywood bass made from laminated wood. It might be painted jet black or bright colors matching the bassist's Delinquent Hair and be covered in stickers. Don't be surprised if the psychobilly bassist stands on the bass to play it or does other stunts. They get percussive sounds by slapping the bass strings against the fingerboard. They occasionally get solos to demonstrate their slapping prowess. The same stunts and slapping are used in rockabilly and traditional blues bands that use upright bass.In these styles, a lot of the time the bass plays a "walking bassline". This is a bassline made up from the chord notes from each chord and some passing notes. It typically goes up and down in pitch, creating a feeling of movement. A typical walking bassline for a chord uses the following pattern: root note, major third of scale, fifth, sixth, and then it goes to the higher octave of the root note and descends via the sixth, fifth and third. This symmetrical rising and falling pattern is then repeated using the different chords of the song (the notes have to be changed to suit the different chords).
Country Music
In Country Music, the upright bass used to be the only bass instrument. Watch films from the 1930s or 1940s and you'll see the big "bass fiddle" being plucked in the background. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Country Music increasingly explored crossovers with rock and pop, bandleaders increasingly used the electric bass, reserving upright bass for rarer old-timey songs. In part, it was a matter of practicality; for a Country Music band on.a cross-country tour in a van, upright bass is big, hard to transport, fragile, vulnerable to temperature and humidity variations, and hard to amplify, as it is prone to feedback howls and specialized gear is needed to get good amplified bass tone. In contrast, the electric bass is smaller, easier to transport, more resilient to temperature and humidity changes, more capable of surviving the hazards of touring, and much easier to amplify (with no risk of feedback).
As well, electric bass is more capable of producing the rock and pop styles that are sought in country rock and pop-infused "new country". Thus in the 2020s at a Country Music show, the bassist often plays bass guitar on most songs, but they may use upright bass for a "hurtin" ballad or a punchy Rockabilly-feel tune.
Country Music bassists must become skilled in playing the walking basslines described above in the psychobilly and Rockabilly section. As well, country bassists must be skilled at playing rock and pop styles. One difference is that whereas in rockabilly and psychobilly, bassists sometimes get short solos to show off, in country music, the bass is used as an accompaniment instrument. It plays a crucial role, but it stays out of the limelight as part of the rhythm section (along with the drums, acoustic guitars and keyboard player).
Jazz and Jazz Fusion
Double bass is one of the cornerstone instruments of jazz, whether you're hearing a jazz quartet at a small club or a huge big band at a jazz festival. For much of a show, the jazz bassist plucks the strings, creating walking basslines that go up and down the fingerboard. From time to time, the jazz bassist may use a bow. Some bassists play a long, low drone note during a slow intro section. Other bassists may play an expressive, improvised bowed melody line during their bass solo. Another common place to hear the bow used is the final deep ending note.
The big difference between jazz and other styles is the role of improvised solos. All of the popular and traditional styles incorporate improvised parts, but what is different in jazz is that much of each song is taken up with instrumental improvised solos. As well, all the instruments get to solo. In a blues band or rock band, it's mostly the "lead instruments" that get solos (e.g., lead guitar, harmonica in a blues band). In a jazz group, the lead instruments and all the rhythm section get solos, including the bassist and drummer. Note that there are styles outside of jazz with a similar focus on extended instrumental solos, such as progressive rock.
Jazz fusion is a style of jazz that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. It merges elements of jazz, like the use of improvised solos, with the electric, amplified instruments and rhythms of rock music. In a traditional 1950s jazz quartet, you'll see a trumpet or sax player backed by a piano player, double bassist and drummer. In a jazz fusion group, there may be an electric guitar player, a synthesizer player, a drummer, and a bassist playing an amplified electric upright bass (EUB) or a bass guitar. The sounds may range from rock and pop to Latin.
Classical Music
In Classical Music, the bass is mostly used in orchestras, with multiple bassists playing the same bassline in unison (like a violin or cello section). Orchestras play music written by composers, with most of the pieces being from the late 1600s to early 1700s Baroque era, the mid-1700s to early 1800s classical era (the Classical Music genre as a whole has a sub-period that is confusingly named the "Classical era"), and the Romantic era, from the early 1800s to the early 1900s. The bassists read the basslines written by the composers and they are not required to improvise. Classical bassists switch between plucking and using the bow.
Classical basslines vary widely from era to era. A Baroque dance suite by J.S. Bach may require the bassists to play a complex walking bassline with the bow note , doubling the cello part an octave below. A Mozart or Haydn symphony from the 1780s might require the bassist to play rapid eighth notes or sixteenth note passages in rising and falling sequences, then pluck a few deep, resonant notes. A romantic symphony by Strauss from the late 1800s may require the bassists to play a melodic line covering the entire fingerboard. An avant-garde work from the late 1900s might require the bassist to create spooky scratchy sounds or artificial harmonics.
Rock and pop
Most rock and pop bands use electric bass to play basslines. However, there are examples of rock and pop bands that use upright bass or electric upright bass. Some rock or pop bands use upright bass as the main bass instrument. A variant approach is to use the electric bass as the main bass instrument and use the upright to add an acoustic color on a few songs.
Recording double bass
In styles where upright bass is usually amplified, a simple way to record the double bass is to use the output from the piezoelectric pickup. The sound engineer may blend the piezoelectric signal with some sound captured by a microphone near the double bass. The reason for mixing the pickup signal with the mic signal is that each has certain strengths. A bass pickup produces clear, distinct deep bass pitches. However, to get the pizzicato tone that is commonly sought in rockabilly and blues the highs are often rolled off to avoid excessive finger noise. By adding in a microphone signal, the sound engineer can capture higher-pitched sounds that got rolled off in the pickup signal, such as the clicks, percussive slapping of a rockabilly bassist, the Helmholtz resonance "thump" from the big bass body that gives upright bass its characteristic tone, and the growling sounds of the bow being used on the low strings at its initial attack. If using a microphone to record upright bass, the bassist needs to be in a separate room or separated with baffles to reduce bleeding from other instruments.
To record a Classical Music bass section, microphones are mounted in front of the bass section. Pickups are not used in Classical Music. The sound engineer can vary the distance of the microphones from the bass section, depending on whether they wish a more close-miked sound (which will include more additional from playing the instruments, such as fingers striking the fingerboard) or move the mics further away and get a more blended sound and less unwanted playing noises. In some cases, the benefits of close miking, such as getting the strong attack on low bowed notes, may outweigh the disadvantages. If the symphony includes a bass solo, the principal bass should get an additional microphone (or more than one microphone) on a separate track.
Sampled and MIDI Double Bass
To record a double bass part for a film or TV show score, an alternative in the 2020s is using synthesized double bass sounds or samples of real instruments and playing them using a MIDI keyboard or programming them. Synthesized double bass sounds are much less convincing than sampled upright bass sounds. Synthesized pizzicato upright bass sounds may be acceptable for the most basic accompaniment purposes, such as held plucked whole notes. However, for more complex plucked basslines, synthesized double bass may not sound natural. Synthesized bowed bass is unlikely to be a good substitute for real bowed double bass except in the simplest accompaniment roles, such as deep pedal points. The lack of expression and variation makes playing bowed double bass passages on a synthesizer sound artificial. Nonetheless, synthesizer versions of double bass are good tools for learning scoring and they can be effective if you want a more electronic, artificial tone, such as in a futuristic sci-fi, CyberPunk or dystopian work. Indeed, if your show or film is a bleak depiction of a future where AI and robots dominate our lives, a sterile, robotic bass tone might be better than acoustic upright bass.Since samples are recordings of a professional bassist playing each note, the resulting basslines can sound like a traditionally recorded track. The less expensive sample programs may only have a small number of samples of each note, so basslines played with samples may sound a bit robotic (a live bassist plays each note slightly differently, altering the tone, pitch and duration in subtle ways).
More expensive sample programs and using a computer with more RAM can enable the use of a large number of samples of every note, longer samples, Round Robin variation of different samples, and random variations in timbre, pitch and duration, which sounds more natural.
With any use of sampled instrument sounds, the most impressive results are when simple accompaniment textures are sought. If you have a sampled double bass bassline consisting of held pizzicato whole notes and sustained bowed notes, it might be hard for all but a professional bassist to discern that it is samples, especially if the bass samples are low in the mix of a vocal-heavy pop ballad.
However, the more you are seeking an expressive, soloistic line, whether this is plucked or arco, the harder it is to get convincing results with sampled double bass. With pizzicato, a professional bass player performing a pizzicato solo will add in subtle ghost notes, hammer-ons, pulloffs, grace notes, fingerboard percussion, and glissandos; a sampled bassline created from regular, generic sampled notes will sound dull and boring.
An expressive bowed solo is similarly hard to recreate with sampled bass notes. A live player performing a bowed solo changes the bow speed, bowing pattern and bow pressure to get subtle changes in the sound (e.g., marcato accents, legato techniques, sforzanfo effects, etc). The basic samples in most sampled programs will not have these sounds. The best sample programs may have these subtle changes as options, but to access them, the sample will need to be edited a great deal at a note-by-note level. For a creator who wants a bass solo on their score, but who cannot afford to hire a professional bass player, it may be worth it to acquire a high-end sample program and do that detailed editing.
Scoring for Double Bass
For jazz, blues, rockabilly, and country, the bass often plays walking basslines. Another feel that is common is "two feel", where the bass plays two half notes per bar that outline the harmony, often a root and a fifth. When there is a chord change, the bass often does a "walk up" or "walk down" to the next chord root in quarter notes.
In blues rock and rock, bass may double a riff that the electric guitar player performs, only down an octave. To create bass riffs, start with the root, fifth, flat seventh and octave above. Using those four notes, the fifth that is an octave below, and cliche chromatic passing note sequences (such as 4, #4, 5,or b7, natural 7, 1), you can create the skeleton for a riff. A riff becomes catchy when these materials are used with hammer-ons, pulloffs, syncopation, and accents to create a memorable line. The same riff is transposed to fit all the chords.
In jazz, rock, blues, and country, you don't have to provide a written bassline unless there is a specific riff or harmony line you want the bassist to play or unless you are hiring a school band or amateur community jazz ensemble. For a professional session musician, all you need to write is the bassline for the first few bars, and then the rest can be a lead sheet or chord chart. For standard tunes, just putting the feel is enough ("slow blues" or "fast swing"); the player will know how to play the appropriate line. Even if you don't provide a written bassline, the chord chart should still indicate stops, punches and other changes.
In Classical Music, the bass and the cellos are typically used in octaves when simple accompaniment lines are needed. The cellos give a more penetrating, high tone and the basses give the low-end depth and heaviness. Since bass is a transposing instrument, with bass parts sounding an octave lower than written, you don't have to write separate bass and cello parts for a simple bassline.If you write a simple bassline that a cello can play, from the open low C two leger lines below the bass staff to the high A three leger lines above the bass staff, most youth orchestra or community orchestra cello and bass sections can play it.
You may want to give the basses a separate part for various reasons. Sometimes, the cellos have a high, arco melodic line, and you want the basses to accompany it with pizzicato quarter notes. Sometimes the cello part is very rapid and it might sound muddy if the basses doubled it an octave down, so you might have basses play every other note or every fourth note.
The simplest way to write a bassline in Classical Music is to have the basses play the root notes of each chord. The basses could play the root as a held bowed note or as a sustained pizzicato note. If you wish to create more sense of movement, the basses can play broken octaves (e.g., low C, high C, low C, high C). Alternatively, basses can play a rhythm using broken octaves, such as a mix of eighth notes and sixteenth notes. The next way to add interest to the bass part is to create a bassline using the roots and the fifth. You can use the fifth above the root or transpose it an octave down.
In moderate tempos, the piano scoring technique of Alberti bass can be effective with double bass. In this technique, the bass plays arpeggios of roots, thirds and fifths, and, where present, sevenths. The pattern is altered using inversions of some chords to create smoother voice leading For example, if a piece consisting of tonic chords and a dominant chords in alternation, the Alberti bass for the dominant chord would likely use a first inversion.
An old orchestration chestnut is "keep the basses up [in pitch]". There is truth to this maxim. With basses' thick, heavy strings that are slow to "speak" and long necks (and thus large spaces between notes), a rapid low-register passage that is moderately challenging for violin and hard for cello may be extremely hard for bass. As a result, the bass players may get behind if a rapid line is too low. In this case, a solution is to have the basses play an octave higher. The maxim should be taken with a grain of salt, though, because for a slow, ponderous section with a bassline consisting of whole notes, half notes or quarter notes, low pitches, even into the sub-bass register (low E, low D, and low C, written two leger lines below the bass staff) can be powerful and effective. Another solution is to have the basses play the same rapid rhythm as the cello line, but the basses play repeated notes.
Another way the "keep the basses up" rule doesn't apply is long pizzicato notes. These are most effective when on low notes. An accented, staccato pizzicato can be effective if in the higher register or the low register.
The "keep the basses up" rule applies if you want an expressive, agile melodic line with the bow. Such a line should mostly be in the register from the open G (fourth space on the bass clef) to the G harmonic (third leger line above the bass staff).
For a professional orchestra or senior/regional youth orchestra, you can use the low extension C (two leger lines below the bass clef as your lowest note). For a regular youth orchestra or community orchestra, the low E (first leger line below the bass staff) is a safer option. For top notes, passages up to the A (on space above third leger line above bass staff) or B are fine for professional and top youth orchestras. For these same ensembles, short thumb position passages up to the high D harmonic (a fourth above the high A) are fine too, especially if there is a scale passage that brings the bassline to this register. For regular youth orchestras and community orchestras, the G harmonic (third leger line above the bass stave) is a good top pitch (with one "cheat/hack": you can also use the high A a tone above, as this can be sounded via the harmonic on the D string).
