The Bass Is The Boss™

There isn't one specific situation that made me arrive at that particular conclusion that the bass is the one calling the shots. The Bass Is The Boss is a concept that emerged over the years from realizing the foundation the bass provides.

Ninety-nine percent of popular music wouldn't survive without bass.

That's what I've noticed in recordings. If you think of music as a bell curve, that's the ninety-nine percent sitting in the middle. You can, in fact, leave the other one percent, and then you have two extremes.

One extreme is where you remove the bass and it still works, and in fact that's almost the defining characteristic of certain music. I can think of two specific examples. The album “…And Justice for All by Metallica”, where everybody knows the story of why there's no bass on it. And very specifically, the song Kiss by Prince has no bass. I've played that song for years and listened to that song for years. I've listened to And Justice for All too, and I never noticed that the bass wasn't there. For some reason, it worked.

The other side is the opposite extreme, that other half percent, where you can strip down the harmony. And all you're left with is the bass, the melody, and the rhythm.

I can think of two specific examples there too. One example is the first section of Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, where it's basically just bass, voice, and rhythm. And I don't feel like anything is missing. And there's another very specific example which, for readers who also speak Spanish, is the song Patria (Motherland) by Rubén Blades, where eighty percent of the song is just rhythm, melody, and bass. And you don't feel like anything is missing. And for those who understand Spanish, I guarantee that if you listen to that song, it'll make you cry.

So, keeping that in mind with recorded music, when it comes to the performing experiences I've had, I have noticed that the quality of a band, wherever you are, is directly proportional to how strong or how weak the bass player is. And I've seen that in countless situations.

For example, while I was studying at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico. The orchestra was the Latin music big band, we were all students and at some point all of us had to correct something here and there.

And the professor, who is an incredibly wise guy, Luis Marín, corrected all of us at some point.

But that guy never corrected the bass player. Not once.

The bass player was exceptional. His name is Abiud Flores, and right now he's a bass player in one of the US Army ensembles. And man, that guy never missed. And even if there were mistakes here and there, the band was incredibly solid mostly thanks to super solid bass work.

Obviously, the same thing also happens with drums or percussion, in this case with drums and percussion working together at the same time. The most fundamental things are the things that are going to make a band strong or weak.

I mean, you can have incredible guitar players, keys, and you can have all of that, but that's what's in the middle.

You have to think of it as kind of an upside-down triangle where the tip of the triangle is the low end, and the kick drum and the bass are the only ones living there. Nobody else fits there.

So if you don't have those guys with the strength to carry everything else, then whatever you have in the mid frequencies won’t save a lack of groove and foundation.

In the middle frequencies guitars fit, pianos fit, vocals fit. And higher up in the spectrum, even more things fit. There's a lot more room to put things in those frequencies.

But the bass and the kick drum, that stuff has to be locked in, because otherwise the whole thing sinks.

And I've had different situations where, because I've worked on cruise ships, in the show band or in the theater orchestra, and I always have different musicians, I've been in situations where the bass player is the strongest link, and other orchestras where the bass player is the weakest link, and everything in between. The difference is huge, like flying Economy vs Economy Plus.

I think one of the things people tend to think, especially when it comes to harmony, is that instruments like the guitar and piano are the only ones providing the number of voices necessary to outline the harmony.

A lot of times we don't realize the importance of the harmonic foundation. The bass is basically the one that decides what the chord is.

Through inversions, every inversion has a different color, and slash chords also provide a different kind of sound. And all of that comes from the bass note. I remember once, while teaching at Danilo Pérez's foundation, Danilo himself used to teach classes to the teachers. He would usually come to Panama once, twice, maybe three times a year, and he would take the opportunity to give lessons to the faculty.

And one of the things he used to say about the famous subject of reharmonization was that before thinking about changing the chord, change the bass note first.

Before changing the chord, change just the bass note.

Don't make the decision to change a chord and reharmonize a melody if you haven't changed the bass first, because many times the answer is already there.

Ideally, the bass player should be the musician who knows the most about harmony, because the note he plays is the one that decides what the chord is.

In my book I mention the example of a C major chord.

If you play a C major chord and the bass plays a C, then the chord is C major.

But if you play that exact same C major chord and the bass player decides to play an A, now the resulting sonority between the guitar and the bass is an A minor 7.

And it doesn't matter how much C major you play, that thing is going to sound like A minor 7, because the bass player is the boss.

One of the things you can try is determining the chord progression of the song you're working on, whether it's an original song or even a cover.

Then, for each chord, if they're triads, each chord is going to have three notes. One of the things you can do is try how each inversion sounds, without changing the guitar voicing.

For example, if you have a C major moving to an F major, what I would do is play a C in the bass and then move to an F. Then play an E under the C chord and move to the F. Then play a G under the C chord and move to the F.

So what's going to happen there? Don't think of harmony as something static. Remember that music is always a temporal phenomenon; it happens through time.

So obviously, if you do the exercise of just listening to one chord with its three inversions, you'll immediately notice that all three inversions have three different colors.

However, this concept becomes much more effective if you think about it in terms of movement and voice leading, where you try different ways of moving toward the next chord from the three different positions represented by the three different notes of the triad you're in.

If you're moving from C major to F major, then try how it sounds with the bass on the three different notes, always moving toward the F.

And after that, you can expand it and do the same experiment with the F chord you're moving to, because you can also change the note you're targeting, since F is F, A, and C.

One of the things you may notice is that both C major and F major contain a C. Even when the chord changes to F, you can stay on the same C and see what effect you're creating. That has a name: the pedal point.

So once you try these different options, you'll notice that your harmonic palette expands without necessarily changing the harmony itself. What you're changing is the voicing and the way it moves.

Then that's something you can immediately try in your songs and evaluate which inversion, or which movement, works better at a particular moment in the song.