Your plucking fingers

What do your fingers have to do with your tone?

Your fingers are the first point of contact between you and the bass. There is obviously certain genetic characteristics about your finger that you can never change, however there are certain things about your digits that are within your control.

Let's start with the plucking fingers. This is your right hand if your are a right handed player.

First and most important, the length of your finger nails play a big roll in the quality and consistency of tone you produce by striking the strings. If your fingernails protrude beyond the tips then you are going to get a pick-like tone. This may be fine if this is a sound you like. The problem is getting a consistent timbre and volume from each attack.

Ideally, you should keep your nails trimmed so they do not extend beyond the tips. The closer the nails get to the tips of your fingers - the more midrange tones you will produce. Keeping your nails very short will yield more bassy tones. You can test this by simply trimming just one nail on your plucking hand and compare the tone between the trimmed nail and the longer untrimmed nail. You can hear a difference. I personally like the sound of my nails when they have just a little length as it helps add some punchy tonal qualities to my sound.

Secondly, the angle and amount of fingertip making contact with the strings will affect the resulting sound. For example, if you pluck with just the very tips you can get a very percussive sounding attack since the tips have an effect of tapping down on the strings. You can also play very quickly as there is little friction and therefore less energy required to get the strings moving. On the other extreme, you can pluck the stings with more of your finger tip by sweeping across the string. You'll get a fatter and warmer tone using this approach. This technique requires more effort as there is more friction on the string and therefore harder to play quickly. I personally like to alternate these techniques to add variety to my bass lines. I'll use just the tips for quick pizzicato lines and more of the tip for walking type bass-lines.

Finally, where you pluck along the length of the string will dramatically effect the quality of sound. I am sure you've noticed that bass players pluck in various spots between the bridge and the neck. Sting for example tends to play very close to the bridge. Stanley Clarke does a lot of playing closer to the neck. Jaco seems to play everywhere sometimes switching positions in the middle of his phrases. So what's the deal? The closer you play to the bridge, the more midrange and harmonic overtone content you will hear. You will also notice that it takes a lot of effort to get a good volume in this position. This is because there is alot of tension on the string here. Alot of players find it easier to play fast lines in this position as the string does not have alot of movement. The closer to the neck position you play, you get less overtones and a bassier content. You will notice that the string has much less tension here. Everywhere in between is just a gradual transition between these two effects. I like the variety you can get from plucking in the various positions. I use my ears to decide what works best for a bass-line.