Learning "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys on Bass Guitar

In this musical challenge, I took on learning the bass part of “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys.

Good Vibrations is considered one of the most influential pop songs in history. Released in 1966, it had an unprecedented production process that revolutionized studio recording.

The song, promoted in the media as a “pocket symphony”, expanded boundaries in popular music and led to more experimentation and more recognition for pop music as an art-form.

The bassist on the track is the legendary studio session musician Carol Kaye. The bass part is played using a pick, and she is known for dampening and muting the strings on her bass with a piece of felt. This gives it a sound that is perhaps more like a jazzy stand up bass, which makes sense as Carol had a jazz background. The following video gives an overview of the song's bass line and how it was played on the recording:

This bass line is relatively slow and simple, but still provides some unique challenges and novelty for me as a beginner to the bass guitar. It shifts around the neck, there are slow parts and fast parts, there are some chords (which seems unusual to me on bass), and it is played with a muted effect with a pick. It provided me with a great challenge to learn more about playing the bass.

The bass part is very interesting in this song. The recording actually has two bass parts according to the video above, but the tab I learned from melds them into one that approximates the sound of the recording.

There is a walking bass line in the chorus that the song’s melody follows. There are a lot of the same patterns being played at different positions on the neck. There is a part where the bass plays some chords, which is tricky for me to do while holding a pick. There are parts with the same simple single notes being thumped over and over. I used the following tab to learn how to play the bass line:

This was a fun song to learn. I liked the variety in the song. The walking bass line part in particular feels good to play, like it is a warmup finger exercise for the bass.

The main challenge to learning this song was trying to get the tone to sound right. I kept my palm pressed gently over the strings to mimic the muted sound that Carol Kaye made on the recording. I tried to pay attention to the tone that I was playing with, trying to mimic the unique sound she got out of the bass with a pick and some muting.

Here is my cover of the song on bass:

Once again, I am amazed with professional musicians being able to play something cleanly consistently. I recorded several covers where I flubbed something, before finally playing it (by my beginner standards) cleanly enough. I guess it just takes an unbelievable amount of repetition to make it so you can master a song to where you never mess up. I feel like I am sweating and panicking that I'm going to mess up on even the easiest parts of songs when I'm recording. Hopefully that goes away with practice.

This influential song is a truly unique work of art, and this bass line is fun to learn and play. This is a great song for beginners to the bass guitar to learn.