Study finds that bassist position is the most important in a band

Study finds that bassist position is the most important in a band

Guitar World recently published an article concluding that the bass guitarist is the most important band member based on a study done by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America based on a paper done 

The following are excerpts from the article at Guitar World:

A study conducted at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, set out to determine the importance of low-frequency information on music listeners. Their results, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were revealing.

The study notes that music contains streams of tones throughout the auditory spectrum and is polyphonic, or multi-voiced. And you don’t need this study to tell you (but it does) that the most important melodic information is carried by the highest voice, such as the lead singer or lead guitar, and the most vital rhythmic information by the lowest voice, i.e. the bass…

The study found that listeners could more easily detect when low-pitched tones were out of rhythm, “indicating better timing encoding for lower-pitched compared with higher-pitch tones.”…

What does all this mean? It means that if you play rhythmic music like rock, metal, blues, jazz or what have you, listeners are more likely to start grooving to the bass than they are to the guitarist’s slick fretwork.”

You can read the rest of the article at Guitar World and take a look at the study at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.