Car Wash - Rose Royce (1975) - bass

It is sooo easy to overplay this song, with lots of wild and uncontrolled slapping. I plead guilty 100%, because I know I did it back in the '80s and '90s when this song was a must in every cover band I played in at that time. It was thé moment for the bass player to shine 3-4 times with the slap bass fill ins. However... listen carefully to the original e.g.    • Rose Royce - Car Wash   from 3:30 when the bass goes solo. How did he make that sound ? Not by wildly slapping. Try it out. It's not slapping, but it neither is pure fingerstyle. On live videos you see the bass player indeed making a slapping movement, but on the record it is much more subdued and subtle. I'm guessing it is a very soft slap, with the fleshy part of the thumb on the A and E strings, and ever so lightly pulling the higher octave notes on D and G. This video shows what I came up with. Try it out yourself. Recorded as ever as purely as possible: PB '76 with very old roundwounds (15+ yrs), bass into mixing console, then into notebook MicIn, no pre- or postprocessing. Only turned up treble up on the mixing console but it hardly has any effect due to the old roundwounds. On the record however the bass sound has the slight upper register accentuated. But remember: this is 1975, only the beginning of the crucial important disco and funk years 78-79-80, and only from 80-81 on production and especially the brilliance of sound in general became an important focus. So that explains why the slapping bass fills are not so sparkly or present, but in the light of that era, it must have been a real novelty. Unfortunately the video has some sync problems in the slap passages. This is because of the light reflecting in the bass and the slow Windows XP notebook can't keep up with the camera frame datarate :).