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Okay, so last night you decided to stay in, take the phone off the hook, set up a comfortable practice area (complete with snacks and your favorite beverage within arm's reach), and really practice hard. The theme: New slap-and-pop grooves. Everything started well, as you quickly ran through the slap grooves you already knew, but then…Frustration! Disaster! Locusts! All of your "new" ideas just sounded like your old grooves. In a final act of frustration, you smashed your bass against the wall and then tried to think of a way to tell your landlord that your cat did it.

It's easy to fall into the trap of playing patterns. Whenever we learn a new technique, scale or Stanley Clarke riff, we memorize the fingering so we can play it faster and more fluidly. The problem arises when we can't break the bound our mind has created between the idea and the initial execution. Instead of slapping the same old octave funk pattern, you try to come up with a variation-and nothing comes to you. I know something like this has happened to you, and I know how frustrating it can be. That's why I came up with a method for breaking these patterns.

The idea for this method came to me after I had an incident much like the one described in the first paragraph. I was trying to write a new funk groove for a recording project, and everything that came out of my amp sounded just like everything else I had ever slapped. After an hour or so I decided to take a break, and I threw my bass down on the bed. (Yeah, like it was to blame for my lack of creativity. When I came back, I didn't realize that I had knocked my G string a whole step flat by tossing the bass. Without checking the tuning, I proceeded to play this dusty old funk groove that I always play…but something sounded new! The old pattern had a cool new sound! I was confused, because I could see my hands weren't doing anything new, but my amp was telling me a different story.

Pretty soon, I figured out that my G string was out of tune. Initially I bummed, because I don't like using alternate tunings-but then I came up with an idea. I recorded myself playing the "new" groove, re-tuned my bass, and then learned the groove off the tape. This forced my left hand to play outside of its comfortable pattern. What occurred next was an unexpected "domino effect": Because my hand was in a new position, other harmonic possibilities became available. To play those "new" notes, I had to change my right-hand slap-and-pop patterns, which gave me new rhythmic ideas. Pretty soon, with the help of a tuning mishap and my tape recorded, I had created a completely new groove!

After that night, I began using this method-which I now call "Changing Your Palette"-as part of my regular practice schedule. Whenever I find myself falling mindlessly into a pattern, out come the tuner and the tape recorder. If you want to try this for yourself, here are a few suggestions:

1. Make sure you retune to an actual note. If you accidentally tune to a quarter-step or some other "in-between" pitch, then it will be very hard to learn the new part off the tape when you return to standard tuning.
2. Right after you change the tuning, start recording. That way, you won't run the risk of missing any new ideas. From my experience, the really cool ideas usually happen within five minutes.
3. Don't tune too high. You could break a string or damage the neck-and I can smell a lawsuit a mile away.
4. Don't always retune to the same intervals. Why? Because that's a pattern!

Whenever I teach this concept, whether it's a clinic or at BIT, the students who try it always report that it's a useful tool for creative exploration. One thing I must stress, however, is that you should always return your bass to standard tuning when you are done. This prevents unusual stress on the neck. More important, if you don't retune, you won't help your hands to change their habits, and thus you will still be limited by old patterns.

So the next time you set up that comfortable practice area and are hoping to discover new grooves, save yourself some stress and try this method. Remember: When a painter finds that all of his work is starting to look alike, he buys some different-colored paints and changes his palette,