Playing Fast Legato Lines on the Bass! (L#49)

This new bass lesson deals with legato playing. What is legato playing? It's combining hammer-ons and pull-offs, which implies that to play legato, you first have to master hammer-ons and pull-offs… So if you haven't already, practice that first. This video will show you what they are, in case you don't know.

Legato playing allows you, among other things, to play very fast lines using mostly your fretting hand, the plucking hand being used only to play the first note on each string. A guy like Jeff Berlin uses legato a lot. But we're not going to start with a solo from Jeff's… No sloppy bass playing here! ;)

We're going to start a bit smaller with a major scale, making sure we're getting a nice strong attack on every note, equal tempo, and that our notes sound even!

We'll use hammer-ons ascending and pull-offs descending… One note concerning the pull-offs: make sure you don't lift up the strings but rather pull them down. If necessary, experiment a bit with that and it will be pretty obvious that your sound is much better when you pull the strings down. Of course you can use lift-ups too, in another context, but not here.