Nuts and Bolts: figuring the bass.

This being St Cecelia's Day, the patron saint of music, I thought it would be appropriate to have a look at something fundamentally musical. 

And there's nothing more fundamentally musical than bass notes.

The bass notes form the base of the music - and, yes, base and bass are basically the same word (see what I did, there?).

These low notes can be sung - by a bass, naturally - or played on a bassoon or a double bass or some other large instrument, like a contrabass tuba.

If you play the sort of instrument which can produce more than one note at a time, then you'll usually play the bass notes with your left hand (or your right thumb if it's a guitar-type instrument. In this sort of instrument the lowest notes are at the top of the instrument - a fact which makes more sense if you remember that the player views his or her strings upside down).

Anyway, how does a player know which bass notes to play?

Well, they can be written down in the same way as the higher notes, of course, but sometimes they're written as what's called a figured bass. This is when some of the bass notes are written down in, er, figures. Figures, that is, as in the numbers 2 or 3 or 4 etc.

The basic idea is that the figures tell you the size of the gap between the bottom note and the next one up (sometimes they tell you other notes, too, but let's not complicate things).

So, the music will have the lowest note written down as a musical note just like any other, and, underneath it, it will say 3, for example. 

Now, as must be clear to everyone, that means that as well as the bass note you also play the note two up from it...

...hmm...

...yes, well...

...I sometimes think that poor St Cecelia must get terribly busy, at times...

Word To Use Today: bass or base. These words comes from the Latin basis, which means pedestal (yes, the sort of thing you put a basin on, though sadly a basin is nothing to do with base).