Hey all you beautiful people! We’re jumping back onto the bass guitar today, for a funky cover of Higher Ground by a little band called Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now originally this song is done by Stevie Wonder, but I’m pretty sure the bass in the Peppers version is a tad more fun to play, so that’s the version we’re doing and you just have to deal with it.
As expected with most anything Flea plays with the group, this song is fast, funky, and freaking painful on the hands. With almost non-stop slaps and pops all over the place, funky lead-like playing during the chorus, honestly the only easy part of this song is the last 10 seconds. And 5 of those seconds is playing nothing. So there’s that. But honestly it’s a very fun track, and leads to some interesting improvisation opportunities. So there’s a few little made up bits, extra slaps, bit of the strumming, just a lot of fun stuff in this video.
I’m hoping to bring the bass into the mix a bit more often, just been working out a bit of a pattern for the uploads while trying to find some of the more fun tracks to jam to. Expect a good portion of the bass covers to be RHCP songs, with some more Primus, possibly some Rush. Hell, maybe even some Funkadelic and George Clinton stuff down the line. But hopefully there’ll be a bass cover once a month or something like that. I’m still working on getting the Live room in the studio set back up for video stuff, so maybe next month sometime you’ll notice a slight change of scenery in the videos.
As always, if you dig the video then head over to the YouTube Channel to keep up to date on all the new videos!