I was still a teenager when I first listened to a certain D’Angelo track, and it left me totally dumbfounded.

Throughout the whole track, it broke the single most important cardinal rule of bass playing that I’d been told.

Over and over, the drums and bass just didn’t line up very well. And not in a ‘playing-different-rhythms’ kind of way. The drums would hit on beat one, and the bass would also hit on beat ‘one’, but noticeably after the drums.

It was straight up “out of time”.

And yet…

It sounded incredible.

It felt amazing…

It wasn’t until years later that I figured out how it could feel so good, but be so badly “out of time”. 

So in today’s lesson, I want to show you this bass line, what’s actually going on with it and how the best bassists sometimes deliberately play “out of time” to make the music feel better.

Check it out here:

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This is one of those things that once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it, but just to hammer the point home in the video, I go in and I change the line to follow the ‘rules’ perfectly, and hopefully you’ll see just how much that sucks the life out of the song.

Good luck with the lesson and happy playing!

Cheers,

Luke