Why were older basslines so much more interesting?

[Stub Mandrel]

I've just put my bass down after a play through of Keep On Running.

 

IMHO it's a great piece of music with a driving bassline featuring good syncopation and memorable riffs. Despite few 'blue' notes it manages to convey a great sense of movement.

 

Other great examples: Heard it on the Grapevine, Sunny Afternoon, Jean Genie... but even some superficially simple songs contain subtle little details. 

 

It's not Beethoven, but it's way more complex than most modern 'pop' music. When waiting to go on, I often quietly play along to the DJ/Jukebox and you can crack many modern songs =very quickly. Why have the basslines of popular music become so basic (excuse the pun)?

 

Is it just that old-school bass players had a bit more theory knowledge? Or just that modern music is so dance oriented the bass has just become an extension of the kick drum?

[Woodinblack]

As I am sure you are aware, it is because all this modern music is just boom boom boom and you don't need a good bass for that

 

Or maybe it is because older music was made by fewer people, who happened to be good, like all the motown song were actually only played by small numbers of musicians, with a large output, whereas in the 80s there was a much larger democracy of players, some good, some bad, and a large number of them only playing the bass because they were the worst guitarist. Then of course, music died in the 90s, and it was just whatever the TB303 put out

 

[ghostwheel]

I'd really like to know what do you think about these two, @Stub Mandrel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU0P4DjnK8w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_PUIp2XbE

[Beedster]

10 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Is it just that old-school bass players had a bit more theory knowledge? Or just that modern music is so dance oriented the bass has just become an extension of the kick drum?

 

It's because you're listening to thw wrong modern music 👍

 

I have a playlist call 'Great basslines' that are tracks that I hear on the radio, usually tracks that I'd not heard before, and usually by artists that surprise me, e.g., Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles, Billy Eilish etc. There is some great bass playing out there 👍

[Stub Mandrel]

5 hours ago, ghostwheel said:

I'd really like to know what do you think about these two, @Stub Mandrel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU0P4DjnK8w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_PUIp2XbE

 

There are plenty of exceptions.

[Stub Mandrel]

1 hour ago, Beedster said:

 

It's because you're listening to thw wrong modern music 👍

 

I have a playlist call 'Great basslines' that are tracks that I hear on the radio, usually tracks that I'd not heard before, and usually by artists that surprise me, e.g., Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles, Billy Eilish etc. There is some great bass playing out there 👍

 

But rarely in the charts. 

[Bilbo]

I am guessing that one of the problems is that so much music nowadays is manufactured on a software platform of some description by people who may not even be able to play any instruments let alone a bass. Lowest common denominator is a single not drone/ thump. Older music was produced when there was more money around to pay musicians to perform (and to contribute ideas) instead of relying on sequencers and samples etc. 

[nekomatic]

I guess there’s always also the old chestnut that the old music we’re still listening to now is the stuff that was good, and the stuff from back then that was terrible has been justly forgotten. 

[Beedster]

On 17/06/2025 at 00:31, Stub Mandrel said:

 

But rarely in the charts. 

Yeh Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish are yet to achieve success at chart level 😂

[Stub Mandrel]

46 minutes ago, Beedster said:

Yeh Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish are yet to achieve success at chart level 😂

 

Let's face it, they and their ilk are a pretty small proportion of modern pop music.

 

You'll find few songs in the Sixties or Seventies charts with straight eights as a bassline, and those bands that did use them often were more sophisticated.

 

I used to think Dire Straits basslines were simple in the 80s, they seem sophisticated now!

Edited 3 hours ago by Stub Mandrel

[Beedster]

28 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

Let's face it, they and their ilk are a pretty small proportion of modern pop music.

 

You'll find few songs in the Sixties or Seventies charts with straight eights as a bassline, and those bands that did use them often were more sophisticated.

 

I used to think Dire Straits basslines were simple in the 80s, they seem sophisticated now!

 

Not buying this at all, I suspect you're basing your 'old music has good bass-lines' idea on a limited set of artists, and doing the same with your 'modern bass-lines are shit'. Have a listen to a station or a show playing 60's and 70's pop and trust me, you'll hear some pretty bland bass parts at least 50% of the time. Re modern music, while I like to explore the road less travelled, I pick up as many decent basslines from the stations my daughters listen to such as Heart and Radio 1 (!!!!!) as I do on Radio 6.

 

Anyway, there ain't no right and wrong to any of this, it's all just opinion and ultimately a function of what each person construes as a decent bass part in the first place      

[Greg Edwards69]

I seem to recall reading that basslines were played in a higher register decades ago due to the limitations of vinyl at the time, as well as playback equipment. Not to mention the limitations of early bass guitar amplifiers. I wonder if this led to more melodic bassline creation?

[Stub Mandrel]

The current top ten.

 

https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart-update/

 

50 years ago?

Whispering Grass ... mellow, fairly straightforward jazzy line on an upright.

I'm Not in Love ... any questions?

Three Steps to Heaven ... simple but some nice stops

The Hustle (Van McCoy) ... nice syncopated funky disco bassline.

The Proud One (Osmonds) ... verse very simple, gets funky in the chorus

Listen to What the Man Said (Wings ) ... nuff said?

Stand By Your Man ... quite a bit going on there.

The Way We Were (Gladys Knight) ... a great slow upright line.

Disco Stomp - (Hamilton Bohannon) .. Would be pretty simple some really honky slides used as accents.

I've done my comparison and I think my observation stands that test. 

[Beedster]

47 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

The current top ten.

 

https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart-update/

 

50 years ago?

Whispering Grass ... mellow, fairly straightforward jazzy line on an upright.

I'm Not in Love ... any questions?

Three Steps to Heaven ... simple but some nice stops

The Hustle (Van McCoy) ... nice syncopated funky disco bassline.

The Proud One (Osmonds) ... verse very simple, gets funky in the chorus

Listen to What the Man Said (Wings ) ... nuff said?

Stand By Your Man ... quite a bit going on there.

The Way We Were (Gladys Knight) ... a great slow upright line.

Disco Stomp - (Hamilton Bohannon) .. Would be pretty simple some really honky slides used as accents.

I've done my comparison and I think my observation stands that test. 

 

I still think it's a matter of opinion mate, two of those are standout basslines to me, I could probably find the same % in contemporary chart music, alongside a whole load of boring basslines as there certainly were in the 50-years ago list 👍

[paulbuzz]

1 hour ago, Beedster said:

 

Not buying this at all, I suspect you're basing your 'old music has good bass-lines' idea on a limited set of artists, and doing the same with your 'modern bass-lines are shit'. Have a listen to a station or a show playing 60's and 70's pop and trust me, you'll hear some pretty bland bass parts at least 50% of the time. Re modern music, while I like to explore the road less travelled, I pick up as many decent basslines from the stations my daughters listen to such as Heart and Radio 1 (!!!!!) as I do on Radio 6.

 

Anyway, there ain't no right and wrong to any of this, it's all just opinion and ultimately a function of what each person construes as a decent bass part in the first place      

Having come up with his proposition, Stub has tested it by comparing today's top 10 against that of 50 years ago. It's a smallish sample size, but it's a fairly reasonable approximation of a random sampling, and not subject to the bias you suggest. It could be improved by testing a few other randomly selected past/current weeks against each other, but I don't think anyone's aiming for a publishable research paper here. 😆

It is of course restricted to 'top 10'-style music, but that's the point of Stub's proposition.

Personally I wouldn't care to venture an opinion one way or the other (not least because I haven't the faintest clue what's in today's charts), but it's a reasonable and (subjectively!) testable hypothesis.

[Beedster]

7 minutes ago, paulbuzz said:

Having come up with his proposition, Stub has tested it by comparing today's top 10 against that of 50 years ago. It's a smallish sample size, but it's a fairly reasonable approximation of a random sampling, and not subject to the bias you suggest. It could be improved by testing a few other randomly selected past/current weeks against each other, but I don't think anyone's aiming for a publishable research paper here. 😆

It is of course restricted to 'top 10'-style music, but that's the point of Stub's proposition.

Personally I wouldn't care to venture an opinion one way or the other (not least because I haven't the faintest clue what's in today's charts), but it's a reasonable and (subjectively!) testable hypothesis.

 

Not sure 'Top-10' was mentioned in the OP I was replying to, it was 'modern music' as below, but like I said, it's still all opinion, so not really a testable hypothesis, more my opinion differs to the O/Ps, and as you say, you don't even have one  

 

On 16/06/2025 at 13:00, Stub Mandrel said:

Why have the basslines of popular music become so basic (excuse the pun)?

 

Is it just that old-school bass players had a bit more theory knowledge? Or just that modern music is so dance oriented the bass has just become an extension of the kick drum?

 

So here's a counter hypothesis: our musical preferences (style, genre, complexity) determine how we draw conclusions about relative merits of style, genre, and complexity

 

 

 

  

[paulbuzz]

29 minutes ago, Beedster said:

So here's a counter hypothesis: our musical preferences (style, genre, complexity) determine how we draw conclusions about relative merits of style, genre, and complexity

I suspect (with no evidence whatsoever 😁) that as bass players, we might find a moderately high level of consensus as to what constitutes an interesting bassline, whilst disagreeing wildly on the merits of the resulting music.

For example, whilst I think that Mark King is a talented and inventive bass player, you couldn't pay me to listen to Level 42 - I'd much rather listen to Dee Dee Ramone go 'dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum'! 😆  

Though by horrible misfortune, I did once see Level 42 on two successive nights, and only one of them was because I was getting paid...! 
But I did get a large collection of discarded and largely unused bass strings at the end of the night, as all his basses were being restrung nightly, and the removed strings, used or otherwise, thrown on the floor of the hall. I didn't have to buy any strings for several years, so thanks Mark 🙂

Edited 5 minutes ago by paulbuzz