Larry Graham

Larry Graham, Jr. (born 14 August, 1946 in Beaumont, Texas) is an African-American singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known as both the bass guitar player in the popular and influential psychedelic soul/funk band

Larry Graham, Jr. (born 14 August, 1946 in Beaumont, Texas) is an African-American singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known as both the bass guitar player in the popular and influential psychedelic soul/funk band Sly & the Family Stone, and as the founder and frontman of Graham Central Station. He is credited with the invention of the slapping technique, which radically expanded the tonal palette of the instrument. He invented this technique to fill the gap when his band was lacking a drummer.

Although bassplayers for decades, indeed into antiquity, had been "slapping" their basses with their thumbs using a rotation of the wrist, Larry Graham pioneered the art of slap-POP playing on the electric bass guitar. The slap-pop style, archetypical of modern funk, couples a percussive thumb-slapping technique of the lower strings with an aggressive finger-snap of the higher strings, often in rhythmic alternation. So-called "Machine-gun bass" (As exemplified by Mark King, Flea, Stanley Clarke, John Norwood Fisher, P-Nut, Dirk Lance) relies on the slap-pop technique, incorporating a large ratio of mute/ghost tones to normal tones.