Alex Webster - Bass Playing

Bass Playing

Webster is recognized as an extremely experienced and talented metal bass player. He can play at exceptionally fast speeds, and does a signature 3-finger walk (a "galloping" finger motion). He revealed in a making-of DVD for Cannibal Corpse's album The Wretched Spawn, where he initially started playing guitar but changed to bass because he felt he could master the instrument more quickly. Unlike usual heavy metal bassists, Webster is able to play his instrument without the use of a pick, while still retaining a clean clear tone, which helps maintain clarity in the complex and very fast lines he plays in conjunction with the heavily distorted guitars of Cannibal Corpse.

Webster stated; “When I was six years old I took some acoustic guitar lessons. It didn't really work out because I was six and didn't really want to learn “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and those were the kind of songs I was being taught. I wanted to play Elvis. I liked all the old 50s music. My dad had a bunch of old 50s records because that's when he was a teenager. Those were what I listened to, because when you're six you don't have the money to go buy stuff, so I just listened to his records. Nobody was going to teach me how to play the guitar like that, out in the country where I lived. I just gave it up until I was 13 or 14. I met a kid in school who played bass in the high school jazz band. He wanted to make some extra money and it was five bucks a lesson. He did a good job too. His name was Mike Hudson. I don't know if he plays anymore. I lost touch with him. He's the one that got me started. I always wanted to play in a band, and to learn how to play lead guitar was going to take like five years. But I really liked the sound of the bass. I liked AC/DC and figured I could do that. I thought I could learn Cliff Williams’ bass parts faster than I could learn to play Angus Young's guitar parts. It was motivation, because I wanted to be in a band. I never wanted to sit around and play music by myself. I wanted to play with other people, and the fastest route to that was playing an instrument that wasn't a lead instrument, and bass was that. Now I've learned to make it a lot more difficult. I've made my job a lot harder than it probably needs to be. But it's just fun. In the beginning my concern was playing in a band.”

"I took some lessons from a friend of mine when I first started. He was in the school jazz band and he taught me the basics. I didn't take lessons for about a year, but I started again when I was a senior in high school. I've had about four different teachers throughout the years, but I never took lessons for more than a few months. I did, however, gain a lot from them and I've tried to learn as much on my own as I can. Anything I can learn about music or bass playing, I'll try to learn. I mean, the more you learn and the more you apply to your playing, it just makes you a better musician."

”I liked the bass player from AC/DC. I really loved the stuff he did. Peter Baltes from Accept was another. I liked the really good guys too, but that seemed out of reach at the beginning. Geddy Lee from Rush and Steve Harris were like gods to me. Billy Sheehan was from Buffalo, and we all knew about Billy before the rest of the country did. Billy has been a legend in Buffalo for a long, long time. He's still one of my favorites. By the time I was listening to Cliff Burton I was getting a little better. I had been playing a year or so before I started listening to Metallica. I thought he was great. I always thought he could have been a little louder on those albums though. That's the thing. In thrash metal or any other kind of metal where the bass is playing exactly what the guitar is playing, automatically the bass went down in the mix. If you notice those older bands like Accept, the bass is doing something that's a little bit different from the guitar. It's more with the kick drum instead of playing the riff the guitar is doing. In thrash metal and then death metal, the bass player always wound up playing what the guitar player was doing most of the time. It's been a decade long fight for us to be heard in the mix.”

"I'd like to do some instructional material, but I'm still not sure if I'll try and do a DVD or book though. It will probably be easier to do a DVD, actually. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with some stuff that's worth releasing. I definitely won't put anything out until I'm sure it's of really high quality, and full of lots of good information. Also, you might have heard about the possibility of us doing a tab book. Well, we still haven't found a publisher for that."

"I practice the most when I have something I'm working on that's difficult, like one of Pat's songs for example. I usually won't practice for more than 3 or 4 hours a day unless I'm really inspired, or I have some kind of deadline."

Besides playing bass, Alex has also contributed to lyric and music writing on many occasions for the band, some examples being "Fucked with a Knife," "Puncture Wound Massacre," "I Will Kill You," "Devoured by Vermin," "Unleashing the Bloodthirsty" and "Murder Worship".

Webster is also known for his bass guitar solos/fills in such songs as "Addicted to Vaginal Skin", "Mangled", "The Undead Will Feast", "Crushing the Despised", "Fucked with a Knife", "Hammer Smashed Face", "The Discipline of Revenge", "Put Them To Death", "She Was Asking For It", "Staring Through The Eyes of the Dead", "Bloodlands", "They Deserve to Die", and "The Strangulation Chair".