Bass Player Magazine Masterclass:
"Sklar Rocks! - Studio Legend Lee Sklar Gets Nasty"
by Bryan Beller
Published March, 2006

NOTE: This article contains references to transcribed musical examples not listed in this reprinting. Click here to see the article on Bass Player's website, complete with audio file samples of the musical examples.

If you know Leland Sklar, chances are it’s from his work with James Taylor, Phil Collins, Hall & Oates, and thousands of other pop records you had no idea he was on but have heard a million times. (Can you say “Gloria” by Laura Branigan, or “It’s Raining Men” by the Weather Girls?) If so, here’s something you didn’t know: He’s a hard rocker. “My heart’s made of rock & roll,” Sklar insists. “I mean, if somebody asked which band I’d join if I could, I’d say ZZ Top—and not because of the beard.”

But Sklar doesn’t have to wait for Billy Gibbons to call, because he’s in Jon Butcher’s grinding rock band Barefoot Servants. And if you don’t think of Sklar as a rock bassist, one listen to the cut “Crack the Sky” from Barefoot Servants 2 [ATOM] will change your mind something fierce. His sound alone is one of the nastiest overdriven tones this side of Tim Commerford.

“The bass line became the centerpiece of the song organically,” says Lee. “I started messing around with Ben Schultz, who’s our guitarist but was also engineering the project. We ended up with this real overdriven bass sound, and we realized that since it was taking up all the space, why not just let it be the dominant factor? I love it, because it’s pretty rare nowadays to hear somebody doing an in-your-face bass part, and it’s really a nasty old thing.” (In case you’re wondering, Schultz and Sklar used the Soldano Preamp setting from Line 6’s Amp Farm plug-in for Pro Tools.)

The examples shown here are from the song’s two main sections. Ex. 1 begins with a unison lick into the tune’s main riff, which Sklar bends and pounds out on the E string for maximum effect. It’s punctuated with an E power chord every other time. The riff is in 7/4, but the drums play through it in 4/4, and the groove drives so hard you barely even notice. “The first inception of this had [original drummer] Ray Brinker playing 7/4, too. It was cool—real tough and weird. But then at one point, he just started playing 4/4 and we stopped and went, ‘Wow, that’s it!’ You don’t even have to count it—it feels natural.” Current Servants’ drummer Neal Wilkinson took that ball and ran with it, much to Sklar’s delight. “I’ve always been a massive fan of English blues rock, so I like that sound in drummers. Whenever I would get around drummers of that ilk, I thought the feel was great. And when Neal sat down to play, it just had that thrashing English thing, and we always kept sitting there going, ‘Bonham! Bonham!’”

Ex. 2 is Sklar going off underneath a guitar solo, again mostly on the E string but sometimes digging into blues licks that take him up the fingerboard. It’s a perfect example of Lee being the hard rock bassist he was born to be, and Barefoot Servants being the perfect vehicle for that side of his musicality, even if it takes some people by surprise.

When people have heard Barefoot Servants play live, the general reaction provides Sklar with some degree of satisfaction. Recalling their last tour, he says, “I had so many people coming up to me saying, ‘I didn’t know you played this kind of music.’ And I went, ‘I play music!’”

By Bryan Beller, copyright 2006 United Entertainment Media. Reprinted from the March, 2006 issue of BASS PLAYER. Reprinted with permission from BASS PLAYER. For subscription information, please call (850) 682-7644 or visit www.bassplayer.com