Bass players are often made the subject of band-related jokes than any other instrumentalist, but as it turns out bass players could be more important than you previously thought.
As Alternative Press points out, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in America has revealed that bass is the most important instrument in a band.
In the study, researches played a high-pitched and a low-pitched stream of music to subjects at the same time, and found that those subjects were more easily able to process the rhythm of the low-pitched stream.
It also found that people were more likely to tap their feet or clap along to songs with a prominent bassline, concluding that humans are simply designed to understand time in music better when it sits lower in the scale of tonality.
“The low-voice superiority effect for encoding timing explains the widespread musical practice of carrying rhythm in bass-ranged instruments and complements previously established high-voice superiority effects for pitch and melody,” concluded the study.
With that in mind, check out some older footage of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea absolutely shredding a bass solo below with Chad Smith on drums.
