Who Needs a Band? Arranging for Solo Bass with Mike Hall
One of my favorite questions to ask anyone is, “Why?” This is not just because I’m a father of three and I have to both ask and answer that a million times a day, but because knowing the motivations and reasonings behind someone’s choices is often even more interesting than the product they are creating. As a bass player with only a few years, a few original parts, and a bunch of covers under his fingers, I’m constantly wondering why players do things. Why did Geezer play this fill there? Why is Chris Squire or John Entwistle playing this note instead of that note? And I know that 95% of the time the answer will be, “Because that’s what sounded good there.” Even that, though, is good information to have. So when I see someone like Mike Hall who is taking songs that were originally full band compositions and modifying them for solo bass, my first thought is, “So why did you do that there and this there?” Followed closely by “How though?” Because my fingers don’t yet want to do the things I’m finding out.
Mike was nice enough to exchange emails with me and focus in specifically on his version of Guns n’ Roses’ classic “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” which you can and should watch above before continuing on in the article. He told me that he picked this song to deep dive on because it is his “most intricate piece to date.”
“When I decided to make a solo bass arrangement to “Sweet Child O’Mine”; I wanted to create something that I could say was truly my own, all while paying homage to the source material,” wrote Mike. His approach began by figuring out a tuning that would allow him to play the lowest note he consistently needed as an open string, which turned out to be a low C#. For reference, the original song is tuned a half step down from standard. Setting his lower range to C# provided him with flexibility in terms of what he could play on top of it. “Second; I wanted to make my melody progressions a mix of both harmonics, and upper register notes, to properly emulate vocals. To pull this off, I needed to use a tuning that allowed me access to the most common harmonics that would complement the general melody of the song. This took some time to figure out, but the tuning eventually turned out to be (from lowest to highest): C# / G# / C# / F#.” That’s already amore thought that I put into parts, and he hasn’t even started playing yet.
I wanted to know if he had a general, overriding idea that he used to rewrite the piece for bass. How on Earth do you think about bass, drums, two guitars, and vocals all at once while creating something that is recognizably “Sweet Child” while also your own thing? “Whenever I was going to be emulating the melody of the song, I would try to be consistent in mixing upper register notes and harmonics with a lower register drone note (which could be an open string or harmonic). This “order of operations” of arranging the composition (combined with using piccolo bass strings, and utilizing chorus reverb with delay) results in a very full, ethereal, beautiful sound that provides the depth necessary for the arrangement to stand out on its own.”
Ok, so that’s how you come up with the notes. But bass is so much more than the notes. It’s how you play them. Are you going to use a pick? Fingers? Slap? Tap? Ebow? And the whole bag of tricks that goes along with that like muting and ghost notes and and and. Mike said that once he had the basic “order of operations” in place he started in on embellishing the arrangement with numerous techniques that helped the eb and flow of the song as a whole. One technique in particular that he incorporated quite often was muted percussion via ghost note triplets, which provided the piece with some much needed spacing between melody progressions and helped prevent it from sounding stale or monotonous. Additionally, the ghost note triplets also helped set up specific harmonics and upper register notes to be accentuated in numerous segments of the song.
As you can clearly see, tapping also come into play here, which he uses sparingly for progressions that required either a quick flurry of notes in the upper register, or was simply required to properly emulate certain parts of the main melody. He also uses two-handed tapping in conjunction with either a drone note open string or harmonic. “It's really important to note that these flashier techniques should generally be used sparingly and/or appropriately,” stress Mike. “Using them when they aren’t needed can run the risk of flat out ruining the song.” This song-over-ego philosophy is something that, in my opinion, most bass players get good at pretty quickly and then spend the rest of our lives psychically trying to instill in our guitar player friends. Or singers, as the case may be. (If you’re a bass player reading this out loud to your guitarist or singer please remind them that I’m kidding.)
The last notable technique that Mike uses is hammer-on 32nd note progressions, mostly throughout the second half of the guitar solo. “The main purpose of these kinds of passages were to crescendo, which were contextual necessities in aiding both the dynamics and general flow of the arrangement. Slap was also used for the bridge section of the piece; however, its purpose was to help transition the dynamics away from the busier solo section, and return the arrangement back to its softer start.” I don’t think that we often think of slap as a way to transition from something busy into something softer, it’s a more aggressive technique most often, so this use of it speaks to Mike’s willingness to be flexible in terms of what the song needs and what he can do to serve that.
This piece also required a couple of mid song tuning adjustments, for the purposes of accounting for both key changes that occur in the original version of the song, and needing access to different sets of harmonics. “I elected to first use drone harmonics to help keep the song progressing while I re-tuned the C# to a D#. For the second tuning adjustment following the guitar solo section, I played 16th notes on the open D# to once again keep the song progressing as I re-tuned the G# to an A#.” Mind you; all of this would have been significantly easier to do if he had hipshots installed onto the headstock, but considering that he doesn’t yet have them, this was the best work around he could think of and I doubt anyone would complain.
If you’re interested in helping Mike get those hipshots, by the way, you can join him on Patreon. Also follow him on YouTube and Instagram. I appreciate him taking the time to get to granular with his thinking when it comes to this cover and hopefully he’ll join us again to break another song down. There’s no better way to learn news ways of thinking than to hear how someone else thinks. If you have a technique or song that you think you do something interesting on and you want to share it, please reach out to me here.
Doug Robertson is the editor of The Bass Blog, the blog component of The Bass Channel, your one stop YouTube channel for all things bass. His number one is a Mexican Geddy Lee Signature Jazz and his boomer is a BEAD tuned T-Bird. He is bass and vocals for Red Hoof in Portland. Find books by Doug here. If you’re interested in contributing to The Bass Blog please reach out to Doug at doug@thebasschannel.net. We would love to hear from you.
