What a Boxer Can Teach You About Thumb Position Sound

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In the 1800s there was an Italian double bass player named Giovanni Bottesini.

He toured Europe as a soloist and went head to head with famous violinists. They called him the “Paganini of the double bass.”

The man made a bass sing up in the register most players are scared to even visit. He used thumb position all over his music, and one concert review from 1865 said his playing made his great double bass “all but syllable the words.”

He did it with a bow, on gut strings, which is what basses were strung with back then. No amp, no pickup.

Oh, and he conducted the world premiere of Verdi’s Aida, in Cairo, in 1871.

Now, nothing about the instrument has gotten more difficult since. If anything, it got easier. Bottesini did all that without an amp or steel strings, and he did it way up high, where you’ve quietly decided you don’t belong.

The top of the fingerboard was never reserved for dead Italian virtuosos. But when most of us get up there, the sound goes thin. And the fix comes from a boxing gym.

What a boxing coach says about power

Ask a boxing coach where the power in a punch comes from, and you’ll hear something that sounds insane.

Relax.

Tension stops the energy from flowing. A clenched arm is a slow arm, and a slow arm can’t hit. The power comes from a loose hand that’s allowed to fly, and the fist only snaps tight at impact.

Tighten up and you hit softer.

The exact same thing is true up high on the bass.

Playing lighter gets a bigger sound in thumb position

You get up into thumb position, the string’s shorter, and every instinct you have screams the same wrong thing. Less string, so I’ve got to dig in more. So you dig in. You muscle it. You strangle the note trying to force sound out of it.

And it does what the tense punch does. Nothing.

Choke a note up high and it sounds huge right next to your ear, then dies about ten feet out. Thin, pinched, gone before it reaches the room. You’re doing twice the work for half the sound.

The fix is the boxer’s fix. Play lighter. Let the note ring instead of squeezing it to death. Up there, the softer you play, the bigger you sound. It’s completely backwards, and it works the second you try it.

If the tension starts before you even play a note, with your hand and shoulder holding the bass up, fix that first. My three thumb position tricks cover the setup that keeps the bass on your leg instead of your shoulder.

Try the ten-foot test

Try this before you change anything else. Play a note way up high the way you always do, digging in. Then play it again, light.

Now hear both from ten feet away. Set your phone across the room, record the two notes back to back and listen. You’ll hear it.

Bottesini got a bass to sing up there with gut strings and a bow. If you’ve spent years staring up at that register like it belongs to somebody else, go play one light note up there today and let it ring all the way across the room.