Phrasing techniques are simple additions to your toolkit that will enable you to play smoother, more effective basslines. They’ll also allow you to add a more expressive edge to your playing, in turn enabling you to find your own unique voice on the bass. The phrasing techniques that we’ll be looking at here include hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, trills and vibrato, all very simple techniques that you’ve probably begun to use already. All of these techniques are performed by the fretting hand.
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In this lesson we’ll look at each of the phrasing techniques covered in this course: hammer-ons and pull-offs, slides, trills and vibrato.
This exercise is a slow tempo rock groove that uses hammer-ons extensively.
Here’s another rock groove that uses hammer-ons.
This exercise is a rock riff that uses pull-offs as well as the ‘galloping’ rhythm that we covered in the sixteenth notes course.
In this exercise, two consecutive pull-offs are used in each bar.
This is a fairly simple exercise that uses slides followed by octaves.
This exercise uses slides to give a smoother feel to a typical rock line.
This groove is based around C and the trill that is used in bars 1 and 3 highlights the major third of the chord.
Here’s another exercise that uses trills.
This exercise is a simple rock riff that uses vibrato quite extensively.
Vibrato is once again used extensively in this exercise.