AS ENVELOPE-PUSHING BASSISTS GO, some have developed unique voices on the instrument; some have redefined the bass through their playing; and some have even pushed the bass into new stages of physical development to accommodate their musical vision. But very few have actually left behind the instrument as we know it. For former King Crimson bassist/ Chapman Stick and Warr Guitar player Trey Gunn, it’s been a natural progression toward full self-expression on seven solo albums and counting. “How much freedom do you give yourself?” Trey asks rhetorically, citing his roots as a punk/new wave bassist who thwacked a P-Bass in the early ’80s. “The bassists with Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, Sting … it wasn’t that they were great players, but they gave themselves freedom and kept the groove going.”
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With a composition degree from the University of Oregon and an affinity for modern 20th-century composers Philip Glass and Steven Reich (an early combined- time-signature alchemist), Gunn eventually ran into Crimson’s mad-scientist guitarist Robert Fripp, and the experimentation began. First Trey changed the intervals on his bass from 4ths to 5ths (“violins and cellos are tuned in 5ths,” he explains). Then he jumped full-bore into learning the Chapman Stick, a tapped instrument with bass strings tuned in 5ths and treble strings tuned in 4ths.
By 1994 Gunn was officially in Crimson and had the Stick mastered, but even that wasn’t enough for him. He eventually helped co-create the Warr Guitar, a 10- string tapped instrument with five strings in each direction, all tuned in 5ths. “Nobody knows how to play this thing,” Trey admits, bowing to reality. “It’s gonna take 50 years!” Fortunately for us, that’s not what this Masterclass is about. Instead, Trey has adapted “Jacaranda” (Ex. 1), a tune from his KTU project’s new album Quiver, for 4-string bass, so we mere mortals can get inside his mind—and his hands—for an exercise in independence and overlapping meters. (Note: It’s been transposed down a halfstep for playability.)
First of all, every note in “Jacaranda” is tapped, or hammered, with the left hand covering the lower staff and the right hand on the upper staff. The left hand is simple enough, with a two-note alternating pattern on the 3rd and 5th frets of the E string. (Trey uses his index and ring fingers to hammer the notes.) Practice just these two notes first, and make sure to enunciate them clearly and tightly, all staccato. Now position your right hand over the 12th fret. Again, using your index and ring fingers, hammer the notes on the Dand Gstrings’ 12th and 14th frets as shown. You’ll need to move your ring finger up and down a string for the last four notes of the bar, which is tricky at first.
Also, try counting seven quarter-notes while playing the upper part. What’s really going on is that there are two bars of 7/8 over seven bars of 2/8, so you’ll feel the upper part repeat itself, with a different emphasis against the original quarter-note. Internalizing this subtle shift is the key to the final step: putting the two parts together. Practice this very slowly at first, with a metronome. It might feel extremely unnatural about halfway through the bar, but eventually, with patience, it will click. “You have two little grooves that are kind of dumb on their own,” says Trey. “But when you put them together, you get a bigger phrase.”
Trey may be a mutant now, but he was human at first like everyone else. “It’s moved into my body now, so I don’t have to count. But I’ve been doing this for 20 years—I spent a lot of time counting.” As for the independence skill required to play pieces like “Jacaranda,” he sees other benefits. “You go through all of the possible permutations of the hands. Your body is teaching every finger to play with every other finger.”
Gunn admits he tends to “go back to 1981” when he picks up a traditional bass, and he doesn’t imagine going back. But for all of Trey’s outré, he’s still one of us bassists at heart. “The whole point of this technique is it’s supposed to groove! If it’s not grooving, who cares about two different meters?”
CHECK HIM OUT
Trey Gunn’s recent recorded work can be heard on his TV scoring compilation Music for Pictures, the upcoming Marco Minnemann project Normalizer 2 (in which he and several other composers fully scored an album-length drum solo), and on the KTU album Quiver [7D Media] in which Gunn, drummer Pat Mastelotto, and Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen create a sound akin to a Viking carnival nightmare in outer space. A KTU tour is scheduled for Europe this summer. Keep up with Trey at his web site, www.treygunn.com.