You should try the first of four combinations of the vertical crossing exercise, is an awesome work to correct your finger alternation.
The crossing is probably, one of most individual and personal feature of bass players, there are not specific ways to follow for learn the “perfect” position of the hand, simply because the are not.
It depends too much from the way how we wear the bass on the body, from our arm and fingers and, where we chose to play the strings.
Everyone approach in a different way and we can recognize it, by simply watching other bassists; off course there are some commons things in most of the cases but, if we are comfortable while we playing and our tone is good, than we don’t have to worry if our approach is different from other players.
But, there is a very important feature on crossing, that doesn’t depend from our personal approach on the bass, but can improve our playing a lot: a correct fingering alternation and up and down movement on strings.
There are bass players that play with two fingers, who does with three, four o who just play with one, there are no mistakes by the way, but if you learn to discipline the alternation of your fingers not only on a singular string but, even up and down, you won’t need to use three or four fingers and you’ll see that there aren’t any limits on what you can play without worry about particular fast tempos or muscular pain.
The following exercise, is the first one of four, I use to teach to my students for improve a correct alternation of the index and middle finger on all the strings, up and down.
Based on the concept of some permutations exercises, (useful to improve the left hand technique); to start, you need to divide the first twelve frets of the fingerboard in three sections, of four frets each.
For each section you will use a combination of two “couple” on the left hand, identified on the chart from the green circle notes and the orange square notes.
Each combination need to be played diagonally, first in descending order and than in ascending order.
You are going to play all the notes, one by one alternating the index and the middle on the right hand.
Now, on the first combination, the first couple will be the index and the middle (green circles) and the second, the ring finger and the little finger (orange square).
So starting from the 1° fret of the E string, you will play consecutively F-B-F-B and than starting from the 1° fret on G string G#-E-C-G#.
Remember each note need to be played with a different finger of the right hand, index-middle-index-middle, it doesn’t matter if you start with the index or the middle, just alternate!
After you play the first two sequences than, without stopping move to the 2° fret and repeat the down and up combinations, than move on the 3° fret and than on the 4° fret.
On the 5° fret change the combination, now the first couple will be the index and ring finger and the second, the middle and the little finger.
Repeat it up to the 9° fret, here you switch to the last combinations, index and little finger for the first combination and, middle and ring finger for the second combination.
Go ahead up to the 12° fret, than just repeat every things in the same order, to going back to the 1° fret.
Practice it at 60-80 and 100 of metronome in two ways:
- the first time playing each note with the same dynamics,
- the second time playing one note with strong dynamic, and one note softly.
In this way you’ll develop not only a good fingers alternation on your right hand, you will improve the control of the dynamics with both index and middle and last but not least, you will also improve your left hand technique.
Hope this helps! Cheers.
Enrico
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