Hey guys, how's it going? I'm here with an amazing bass player. Are you local to New York?

I am. Local to New York. John Ferrara, and you'll have just heard or seen an incredible performance.

And it is all John, well, and his friend over there, he's not playing drums and bass.

I don't even know where to start, John, to be fair. Let's start about your playing. How did you

actually get into doing what you do, which is just this incredible two-handed tapping?

Well, the tapping kind of came kind of my accident. I used it at first as a tool to write.

I was like, all right, I have an idea for a bass line. I have an idea for a melody, I want to kind of manifest it to some extent just to hear what they'll sound like together. Yeah. And so I was like, all right, well let's see, a base could, you know, left hand could do something, right hand could do something, and kind of awkwardly stumbling on different techniques over time by doing that. When did you start doing that technique? When

did you first start looking at it to do with it? I mean, maybe seven, eight years ago, something like

that. And then, you know, it started off, as I said, just more of like as a compositional tool.

Yeah. And then from doing that for a while, I started developing chops doing it. And I was, I said, okay, well, some of these could be exercises. Let me develop them as exercises. And then I'm a big, I'm a fan of a lot of kinds of music, but classical and jazz are like two of my big, you know, genres that I go to. And so we kind of model it, try to model it, after players that I really liked,

like Brad Meldow and not in Chikorea.

Then on the classical side, I'm a big Bach fan and minimalist composers as well,

like Philip Glass and Steve Wright and stuff like that.

So I was kind of learning a lot of those pieces and, you know, trying the tapping stuff out with those. Do you play piano? No. I was in the control of him. I was like, I wonder if he plays piano. I wonder if he's like a ninja piano player. He's just sort of like brought it to the base. Not at all. You know, my whole thing has been whatever I wanted,

whatever instrument I like, because I can't play anything else. I'll just try to replicate

on the bass as best as I can. I feel like there's so many things that the instrument can do.

Yeah. So having that outlook has actually helped me to, you know, develop some interesting

techniques that are kind of fun to play. Yeah, yeah. Was it the right hand that was the, is that the kind of the, the hardest piece of the puzzle to get into it? If people have just watched what you've done and you've blown their minds and they want to, you know, they're thinking, yeah, I'm going to give this a shot, is it the right hand that's the hardest bit to get going to start with? Yeah, in a way, like in the right hand I don't use my pinky almost ever. These two are strong from finger style playing. Yeah, so your index in the middle are used, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, as you said, like the left hand is, you know, it's used to fretting and everything. So the right hand, you need some, you know, need some love. And you're using your ring finger as well. Yeah, yeah. And like, what kind of exercises did you start off with when you first got into this? Like, if you're anything like me, you probably devised exercises, you know, to kind of get you where you wanted to go.

Like, what kind of stuff did you start with?

And what kind of stuff should people start with when they're doing this?

Well, one thing that I did is just taking the pieces that we just did, use a lot of this, just sevenths.

So if you take, like, just sevenths. So if you take like...

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