How to play the bass like Carol Kaye
Only a select few in the world of bass-playing can claim to have changed the form, with one of the most significant figures to have picked up the instrument being Carol Kaye. A member of ‘The Wrecking Crew’, the legendary group of Los Angeles-session musicians, Kaye has played on an estimated 10,000 records throughout her career. Many of these are classics, too, with credits on hits by Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Simon and Garfunkel, Frank Zappa, Nancy Sinatra, The Monkees, and many more. Kaye’s story is peculiar in that many do not know her name, but most know at least one of her iconic bass lines.
Her most famous cuts include the busy ‘Good Vibrations’ by The Beach Boys and the equally as vibrant ‘I Was Made to Love Her’ by Stevie Wonder. Kaye even played on what many deem to be the greatest song of all time, Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’. It’s remarkable to think that these are only three moments of many that have impacted popular culture so significantly. Not just confined to popular music, Kaye also helped to lift the television soundtrack out of the doldrums and gave shows such as Mission: Impossible, M*A*S*H and Hawaii Five-O their pulse.
Kaye bridged the traditional gap that music theory creates between the guitar and bass. She started as a jazz guitar player and only made her segue into the world of denser sounds by chance. “I was playing a session at Capitol Records, and the bass player didn’t show up,” she once explained. “So, they put me on a Fender bass – easy as that. I started creating lines that I always heard in my head, things that I thought bass players should play. I just provided what the music needed.”
Ultimately, this unique attitude underpinned her ability to change the form, modernising the bass in many ways. Together, her efforts, in tandem with those of James Jamerson for Motown, energised the four-string, making it a much less tedious and one-dimensional prospect than it had once been. She transformed its role in the mix by thinking about tone, technique and having a general concept. The bass was now in control. Demonstrative of Kaye’s significance, it is rumoured that Paul McCartney’s venerated bass work on The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s was directly inspired by hers on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds from the year prior.
So, that begs the question: how do you play bass like Carol Kaye?
The first component is attitude. This is something Kay has always boasted since childhood and retains at the age of 87. Fearless and unfazed by the two great obstacles of her generation – race and gender – Kaye invariably remained concentrated solely on the music. She once said: “A note doesn’t have sex to it. You either play it good, or you don’t play it good. Some people can’t handle that, especially some men, because they want to think it was a man that played the bass because of a sexual thing. But when you hear somebody with balls, that’s me.”
When asked how she creates her sound, Kaye recalled an anecdote of the day she really learnt to understand rhythm, thanks to the legendary rock ‘n’ roll drummer Earl Palmer. She said: “You have to have an excellent sense of time. When I got on this date with Earl Palmer one time, he said, ‘Carol, you sound great’. I said, ‘Oh, thank you’. I had gotten a little cocky attitude because I knew the bass was the answer to my being happy in the studio, where I was making a lot of money and enjoying playing, so I was cocky as hell. And he’s saying, ‘But, you’re rushing.’ I listened to the playbacks, ‘No, I’m not rushing, I’m not rushing.'”
Kaye continued: “But I really listened, and I thought he was right. So I went home and practiced on the bass to the metronome, just like we did in the bebop jazz; on the time. And you could be close, but unless this (the metronome) feels like it’s grooving, you’re not in. It took me two or three days to get in on all styles of music. Once I got locked in, then my sense of time was immovable.”
Now we’ve got the attitude down – fuelled by equal parts self-belief and the will to constantly improve – we need more technical tools. Although Kaye has been seen playing extensively on an Ibanez SRX700 in the 21st century and a Gibson Ripper at points in her heyday, the instrument she is most closely associated with is the Fender Precision Bass. It’s a versatile model, so perfect for her work.
Noted for using Thomastik-Infeld JF344 flatwound heavy gauge strings, with a high action set-up on her bass, she also opts for a heavy gauge teardrop pick to give more weight to her notes, making the bass really carry the rest of the song. This is precisely why so many people believe that Kaye refreshed the bass. In this technical sense, she made it a much more potent instrument – effectively paving the way for the heavy-duty sounds that now carry entire genres like metal and hardcore. It’s strange to think, but without Carol Kaye, there’d be no Cliff Burton, Chi Cheng, or Robert Trujillo.
Reflective of the innovation that Kaye brought to the bass, she also used a unique mute to reduce the scope of unwanted over and undertones. It’s a piece of felt folded over, roughly an inch and a half wide, stuck gently over the strings at the bridge with a length of tape holding it in place. “Guitar players would use a piece of felt intertwined between the strings and behind the bridge to get a nice sound,” she recalled to Premier Guitar. “So I noticed right away that I had to do the same thing for electric bass, because the thicker basses had a terrible time with overtones and undertones, which killed the sound. The minute I put the mute on the top of the strings, in front of the bridge— there was no way to get a mute behind the bridge because that was the end of the strings—I noticed the tone immediately. I mean, for 25 cents, you could get the best sound in town [laughs].”
As for the amplifiers, this was another area in which Carol Kaye bridged the gap between guitar and bass to create something entirely new. In the studio, she preferred to use guitar amplifiers when playing bass, with her favoured companion being the Fender Super Reverb. A Versatone Pan-O-Flex was also used at points, as were other models.
Kaye is famously noted for her melodic and syncopated basslines, which bring fun and energy into her playing. She also has a penchant for the instrument’s upper register and has used the upright double bass to cover the low end in the studio. She has a chordal approach to picking, sticking to the notes in the chord, with some passing tones and rhythmic lines added for flavour. Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Was Made to Love Her’ is one of the best examples of her style, remaining widely influential in bass playing. Playing the root notes of the chord, she adds an arpeggio walk-up at the end of the phrase. It is less complicated than it sounds, as she’s essentially playing the notes in the chords but arpeggios. This also served another purpose. It helped Kaye to remind herself of what part of the song she was at by breaking up the straight-up rhythm.
A genius bass player who fused her authentic character with innovation, creating an extensive legacy.
