Break it Down: 'Space Oddity' by David Bowie

By Brian Adam McCune

"Space Oddity" is one of the most difficult bass notetracks in the entire Rocksmith library. While it doesn’t display the sheer velocity and notes-per-second of Black Betty’s "Ram Jam," it does have a few things working in tandem to trip up even the most experienced bass players. Here's a nice playthrough dating all the way back to the original Rocksmith!

Here's what sets this track apart, and might make it more difficult than you expect:

It doesn’t repeat riffs very often.

Herbie Flowers’ approach to this track is more jazz than rock ‘n’ roll: he creates melodic contours that dance around the roots of the chords, sometimes even delaying the arrival of tonic for a few beats. The bass guitar is the acoustic foundation of all of rock music: low pitches provide a low-frequency bed on which guitar and vocals are supported. Most rock tunes have the bass reinforcing the harmonic content with mostly root notes played in time with the rhythms of the guitars, just one octave lower. By breaking free from playing only root notes with rhythmic regularity, Herbie is helping David Bowie achieve a free-floating texture that is extremely uncommon in rock music.

It offers a complete exploration of the fretboard.

Flowers' melodic approach also lends itself to really utilitizing all the frets at your disposal; no other bass arrangement in the game goes up and down the neck with such frequency. We have low open Es on the red string, high slidy-bits up to the 21st fret on the D string (blue), and everything in between. Near the end of the track (around 4:38 in this video), after a few yellow 5s and 7s, Herbie launches into the stratosphere of the instrument and slip-slides his way around notes in the scale.

The song uses syncopation wonderfully.

This is perhaps most evident in bridge sections of the tune, such as at the 2:29 mark. After playing the root note F (yellow 8) and the octave above it (orange 10), every note until the downbeat of the next measure (yellow 7) is played on the inner-beats, mostly commonly referred to as upbeats. This avoidance of downbeats--which are stronger than upbeats—is textbook syncopation. And the fact that there are five in a row (O9-B12-B10-B9-Y10) temporarily dispels any sense of gravity (see what I did there?) until we land on measure 39 below. By stark contrast, Herbie gives us three strong beats in a row (Y7-R7-R0) in measure 39, almost as if we were floating in time only to land firmly on the second measure.

I believe these three elements work together to create a musical metaphor for subject matter of "Space Oddity" -- an appropriately named tune for what the bass is doing in the song.

Brian Adam McCune joined the Rocksmith team in 2010 and became the Lead Notetracker in 2012. He holds a Master’s degree in composition, and is active as a composer, arranger, orchestrator, percussionist, and educator

"David Bowie Grafitti @ Britxton!" by Louise McLaren is licensed under CC BY 2.0