John Deacon, the bassplayer for Queen, is one of my bass heroes ever since I took up playing bass and even long before that. When I heard the song "You're my best friend" the first time, I was immediately caught by the bassline. His fluent runs on the higher register are one of the very outstanding features of his bass playing and I always had fun transcribing, learning and playing his basslines. His choice of notes reveales a great musical background knowledge - besides bass he also played the piano and the guitar and he had the technical skills to master his often virtuosic ideas. Later I realised that Deacon had also written the song and even played the electric piano on that tune and ever since I'm a big fan of his musical talent. In addition to "You're my best friend" he also wrote a few more big hits for Queen like "Spread Your Wings", "Another One Bites The Dust" or "I Want To Break Free".
Here's the excerpt of the video documentation "The Making of A Night At The Opera" concerning John Deacon and his hit song:
And here's the isolated bassline:
As I mentioned before I've transcribed a lot of John Deacon's basslines. You can find some here on my blog:
My absolute favorite one is "Millionaire Waltz".
But amongst others I also did "Spread Your Wings", "Teo Torriatte", of course "Another One Bites The Dust", "I Want It All" and "Under Pressure".
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