I'm not dogging slapping as a playing style that is part of a greater composition or just wanking or whatever. I'm a 'song first' player myself even though I can drop Claypool lines with the best of them. I'm just tired of seeing fake shit on YouTube that sounds like a preset for a rhythm machine supposedly showcasing all these amazing players that somehow have never had a break. If the players were REALLY as good as video trickery is making them look, it would be a different matter. Look, if the shitty YouTube videos of Justin Beiber's terrible performances made him a star, all these "super players" should be overrunning modern music completely.
It's to the point that I question whether some of the showcased "players" (which all seem to be attractive girls) even play the instrument at all. Most of those slap licks are WAY too clean to have been produced by a real bass and the rhythms are obviously looped and like Seinfeld's riffs, sourced from a keyboard sound bank. I've seen other videos with girl bass players supposedly supplying entire rhythm sections with nothing more than a 4-string and an open back guitar combo. Try slapping for real on one of those sometime and see what happens. The dynamics of an actual player will always vary slightly and all it takes is a single overenthusiastic pop and bye-bye speaker, yet in a flurry of hand motion and camera hamming, the tone, timing and individual note volume never deviates outside of a few patterns.
Maybe I'm just a bitter old traditionalist, but I LIKED Heesey's playing as used to showcase the differences in tone between various T-Birds and don't think that he should be slagged for not keeping perfect tempo on music store riffs and then to have his very real playing which involved minimal post production (editing for time, inserting slates and graphics) weighed against the obvious fakery of some cute Asian chick fronting keyboard-sourced basslines, it bugs me because we're players and ought to know better. Maybe it's because I work with live TV every day and know how hard it is to get consistency even in a multimillion dollar studio that when I see what is supposed to be a single camera as-live presentation that is anything but, it grates on me.
