10 hard bass songs to play

Excellence in bass-playing is a pure and modest virtuosity. Unlike the voice, guitar or drums, the bass is an instrument that rarely takes centre stage. Its role is undoubtedly a crucial one, but much of its good work goes unnoticed - and unappreciated.

So let’s give exceptional bass music some appreciation. Listed below are ten pieces of music that feature some of the most outstanding bass material ever concocted. 

True to form, that material can be subdued, but even in these moments the music makes big demands. Bassists bear a heavy burden, having to provide the rock-solid foundations to a musical texture. In these playing conditions, it can be tough to perform even the most straightforward stuff reliably and with a subtle flair.

But make no mistake, at times there’s just no holding back the scintillating fretwork, and you’ll find plenty of that in this list of the ten hardest songs to play on the bass guitar.
 

Hardest songs to play on bass
 

1. ‘Easy’ by the Commodores
2. ‘Fever’ by Aerosmith
3. ‘Can’t Fool the Blues’ by BBM
4. ‘The Blood, the Sweat, the Tears’ by Machine Head
5. ‘Sir Duke’ by Stevie Wonder
6. ‘Cowboys from Hell’ by Pantera
7. Hermetica VII by Bernhard Lang
8. ‘Born of Fire’ by Slayer
9. ‘The Grudge’ by Tool
10. ‘Autos, Jets, Aviones, Barcos’ by Serú Girán

1. ‘Easy’ by the Commodores

Safe to say that Commodores aren’t renowned for virtuosic bass-playing. Formed in the late 1960s and signed by Motown in 1972, they’re revered for catchy pop hooks, heartfelt ballads, and tight-knit vocal harmonies spearheaded by founding member and general superstar Lionel Richie. 

Those three elements come together in ‘Easy’, a huge 1977 hit for Commodores written by Richie. It also happens to feature some heavyweight bass from Ron LaPread, who was with the group between 1970 and ’86. His playing’s rich, tight and inventive, and there are some nightmare licks that will give your fingering and picking hands a real workout.

Even so, it isn’t the most technically advanced part. But the real challenge is to find the balance between complexity and simplicity, and that takes real mastery. In this arrangement for concert band, you have to root the whole ensemble in a steady groove as you navigate those awkward phrases. Don’t be fooled by the title - it’s far from ‘easy’.

2. ‘Fever’ by Aerosmith

Aerosmith are one of the great hard-rock bands of all time. Top of the game from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, they’re known for their rebellious persona, big-budget music videos, and even bigger hair. Musically, the group’s capable of the most lyrical rock ballads, but their hard-hitting head-bangers are no less iconic. 

That’s what we find them performing in ‘Fever’, a whirlwind tune from their 1993 album, Get a Grip. The album, which contains a number of Aerosmith’s most popular songs, was a bestseller, attracting an Aerosmith-loving audience that was wider than ever. Absolutely key to their sound and success were Tom Hamilton’s gutsy bass lines.

Fittingly, given the song’s title, Hamilton plays with frantic intensity on ‘Fever’. Try to keep up as he moves between torrents of semiquavers in the verses, to the carefully sculpted phrases of the chorus. The bass really is high in the mix here - it comes in like a hammer,  and acts as the engine that drives the group and song forward.

3. ‘Can’t Fool the Blues’ by BBM

BBM - Bruce, Baker and Moore - was a 1990s supergroup formed by three legends of rock music and masters of their instruments. Gary Moore on guitar, Ginger Baker at the drum stool, and Jack Bruce on the all-important bass. After releasing one album, Around the Next Dream, and playing a few gigs, they went their separate ways.

Each of the trio had been playing the blues throughout their career. Baker and Bruce had done it with the band Cream, and Moore - once a member of Thin Lizzy - as a solo artist. ‘Can’t Fool the Blues’ saw them on very familiar ground. Listen to the song and you’ll hear three bluesmen jamming through a framework that they lived and breathed.

Moore’s guitar is doubtless the most ear-catching aspect of the recording, but supporting his scintillating work is Bruce’s rich, intricate and flawless bass performance. It’s worth stressing that Bruce was influenced by jazz. The genre had always inspired his flair for virtuosity, and echoes of it can be heard at times in his lines - nobody plays quite like him.

4. ‘The Blood, the Sweat, the Tears’ by Machine Head

Helpfully, this song comes with a warning in its title. ‘The Blood, the Sweat, the Tears’ tells you everything you need to know before you start learning it. It featured on The Burning Red, Machine Head’s 1999 album that saw the group gravitate towards ‘nu metal’ by incorporating elements of hip hop, rap and disco into their sound.

Bassist Adam Duce co-founded Machine Head, and from then until his 2013 departure, he always ensured that his bass was a prominent voice in their heavy-metal soundworld. So it is in this song, in which he binds the ensemble together, at times shadowing the guitar, at others the drums. 

No doubt the most difficult aspect of Duce’s part here is the sequence of rapid chromatic phrases, played alongside guitarist Ahrue Luster. To play this on a bass requires perfect coordination, fingerwork, and rhythmic precision - and a lot of stamina. These are the assets needed by a great metal bassist - or anyone taking on this Machine Head number.

5. ‘Sir Duke’ by Stevie Wonder

Early on in his career, Stevie Wonder was in the habit of playing all the instruments when he recorded his studio albums. For Songs in the Key of Life, however, recorded between 1974 and ’76, he brought in a swathe of session musicians. Among that personnel was the young and spectacularly talented bassist, Nathan Watts. 

Appearing on that album is ‘Sir Duke’, a tribute to the late Duke Ellington, whom Wonder has absolutely joined in the pantheon of great African-American composer-performers. In homage to Duke’s iconic swing orchestra, Wonder included saxes and trumpets on the recording, to give it that unmistakable big-band sound. 

Underneath those brassy horns and Wonder’s vocals, Watts supplies his part. He glides effortlessly between casual walking basslines and acrobatic doubling of melodic material. It’s a supreme piece of bass construction realised with technical brilliance, and as the song progresses it just gets more and more complex. 

6. ‘Cowboys from Hell’ by Pantera

A major name in the story of heavy metal, Pantera are revered in particular for helping to establish the subgenres of thrash and groove metal. Cowboys from Hell, the band’s 1990 album, is seen as a landmark in the development of the latter style, helping to establish riff-based textures, syncopation and instrumental interplay as textbook attributes.

‘Cowboys from Hell’ - title track and album-opener - lays down these hallmarks perfectly. All are audible in Rex Brown’s explosive bass part, which brings so much of that textbook groove. He wasn’t a founding member, but Brown played with Pantera all but throughout its history, and his contribution was completely integral. 

In ‘Cowboys from Hell’, he races through shifting semiquaver runs at a blistering 115 beats per minute, chugging with clockwork accuracy. Gestures are jaggedly assembled but deftly played - it’s a total masterclass. This is music to accompany the opening of the gates to the underworld, and it really sounds like it.

7. Hermetica VII by Bernhard Lang

Here we step outside the realm of popular music for the first time, and into the intimidating realm of the avant-garde. The bass guitar might not be the first instrument that comes to mind when you think of the classical tradition, but that definitely didn’t deter Bernhard Lang when he composed Hermetica VII.

Lang probably wouldn’t appreciate this introduction. He’s a composer that evades labels and crosses boundaries, welcoming the influence of any and all musical styles, traditions and genres. That might be why he ends up bringing electric instruments more typical of popular music into the concert hall. 

In Hermetica, the bass is accompanied by a mixed chorus, which constructs a cathedral of sound. Inside, the bass solo works tirelessly, employing extended techniques and amp effects, handling impossibly dense material against complicated time-signature changes. Lang leaves nothing out in this tour-de-force piece for the instrument.

8. ‘Born of Fire’ by Slayer

We come to another pioneering thrash-metal band. The genre is characterised by intense, fast and virtuosic music, and that’s why so many thrash bands make their way onto lists of hard bass music like this one. And there aren’t many bands more closely associated with these traits than Slayer.

Perhaps the best example of bassist-vocalist Tom Araya bringing all that to the fretboard is ‘Born of Fire’. It’s the penultimate track on Slayer’s 1990 album, Seasons in the Abyss, and it starts as it means to go on with, a flurry of lightning-fast triplet phrases, played in unison by bass, guitar and drums. 

The group then breaks into a frenzied verse, through which Araya plays a pounding bass line for the whole song, letting up only once between the guitar solo and the last verses. To play this many notes cleanly and to the pulse at this tempo is unspeakably difficult to do. And when Slayer performs, Araya does this in one song after another, time after time.

9. ‘The Grudge’ by Tool

Formed in 1990, Tool did much of their music-making in step with the bands that we’ve looked at already. But though they might have started out as a conventional metal group, they began to go about their music-making in a slightly different way, taking a path that ran parallel to those trod by the bands above. 

This was alternative metal, and Tool really began to own that style on their 2001 album, Lateralus. The opening track, ‘The Grudge’, says everything that you need to know about this signature sound, and about the incredible bass-playing of Justin Chancellor. It’s marked by their taste for structural and thematic complexity.

The song opens in an unsteady 5/8 time, with Chancellor playing a spiky motif that cuts across the prevailing pulse. But that idea is soon replaced by new material, which ranges from gentle melodic lines through syncopated pedals to fast arpeggiated phrases. But in all cases, Chancellor contends effortlessly with irregular and confusing metres.

10. ‘Autos, Jets, Aviones, Barcos’ by Serú Girán

Serú Girán was a progressive-rock group that formed in Buenos Aires in 1978. That same year, they released their eponymously titled debut album, which is marked by some of the most consistently daring and complicated bass-playing that you’re ever likely to come across. Perhaps the best of it can be heard on ‘Autos, Jets, Aviones, Barcos’.

The culprit here is Pedro Aznar, a multi-instrumentalist who became one of the most significant and versatile figures in Argentine music. A virtuoso fretless bassist who had a real taste for jazz, he brings his imaginative, improvisatory phrasing to the song and the album it appears on, bringing an unbelievable dynamism to Serú Girán’s music.

So staggering is this work, transcriptions by Federico Perea of each of Aznar’s bass parts on the album have been published by Melos, in the title El bajo electrico de Pedro Aznar en Serú Girán. Turn to ‘Autos’ and you can see for yourself Aznar’s remarkable ability to generate layered, expansive textures with just two hands and four strings.  

Your next steps for bass music
 

Find the notes for these ten songs, and for countless others, among nkoda’s collection of bass guitar sheet music. Plug in, tune up, activate distortion and play.

Bear in mind that the vast majority of titles available are much easier than the repertoire we’ve explored here. After the journey we’ve been on, it’s easy to forget that not all bass songs are as impenetrable as these. 

The library spans classical, rock, jazz, soul, pop, folk, and most other music genres that you’d care to name, so no matter the type of bass music you like to play, you’re bound to find something that suits. 

After similar blog content? There are a few other bass-related articles to read, including best bass players, and easy bass songs - great for beginners. 

Check out the best bass songs article too, which contains more than a few good bass lines. If the bass anthem you’d hoped to find didn’t feature here, then you might find it there - there’s Muse, Nirvana, Rush and plenty more.