Originally posted by basics
Are there bass tabs out there? I'm sure there are. Generally you can just hit the bottom note of the chord the guitar plays but if it's riff based it may take a while to pick it up by ear (the more you do this the better you'll get at it of course).

Not true. Of course this is how a guitarist would look at the instrument. Always playing the lowest note will make the bass part very dull, the guitar part and bass part should (not all the time) work like counterpoint. It's good to play other notes than the root or lowest note because chord changes on the guitar usually skip in larger intervals. Moving in smaller intervals makes for a more melodic sound, and bass sounds it's best when it's melodic sounding.

The basic idea on bass when working with chords on the guitar is to look at the notes that make up a chord. Take an A minor chord, a bassist will think A minor is made up of the notes A, C, and E. So it's cool to play any of those three notes when the guitar plays a A minor chord. When it comes to connecting two chords, like E7 to A minor. To make the bass movement more melodic, the bass may play G# to A. When the guitar plays E7 to Am. So the chord progession becomes E7/G# to Am.

Rask- it's not the same sound though. I agree you can get a nice rich tone with alittle bite in the mids by doing what you said. I was just comparing pick to fingers. The finger nail technique was something I didn't consider at the time but is very close to a pick sound. Slapping, to me, is a whole another sound to itself.