Imitating 80's synth bass using slapping

In my early 20's I lived through this era as a developing musician, when the Linn drum took the studio and production world over and bass synth became de vigueur. Already having a heavy preference for older black music (Chic, EW&F), I watched in horror how the music industry and pop charts were quickly being taken over by electronic songs in all kinds of genres. Many new artists rose to the top with this kind of sound, but it also forced previously established artists to adapt their repertoire to incorporate it.
Now long past my earlier purist tendencies and disgust and pessimism about the lack of genuine musicianship in these programmed songs, I am fascinated by some of those bass lines, their timing, even their funkiness, and wondering: were they actually all programmed ? Madonna certainly used a live bass synth player on some live concerts, check it out !    • Madonna - Into The Groove (Live Aid 1985)  . It took me the entire clip before I noticed him :), it's the guy in black in the middle.
Notice that this is entirely live playing, both drums and bass synth. There may have been a click in the drummers headphones just for tempo, but there is no sampled backing track. It's a serious feat to make electronic music music sound like this with live playing ! Mind you that in those days, there were not yet things like DAW's like ProTools available, less even live real-time digital correction possibilities. (if there were, I guess Madonna would have had her pitch corrected here and there).

When paying close attention, in many of those bass lines there is a kind of organic aspect in the timing and use of ghost notes. Obviously the keyboard players (be it converted bass players or plain keyboard players) where trying to imitate the feel and time of a normal bass guitar, adding ghost notes. But then again, the bass synths in use at that time (I am no expert on that but have played some occasionally) were not so touch-sensitive, so a note pressed on a keyboard was either "on" or "off", so in order to get the appearance of a ghost note (like a muted string on a bass guitar), they had to play these incredibly short, staccato notes, that have the strong attack but almost no duration and very short decay. Being the copycat I am, it was unavoidable that I was and still am fascinated by those fat, organic sounding electronic bass lines, and apparantly I assimilated this feel so deeply that I am almost capable of reproducing it on a bass guitar, slapping. This despite the fact that the physical medium is so different: on a keyboard you press a single key, on a bass you need to press down a string with one hand and tap it immediately after with the other... and microseconds make a lot of difference in the resulting sound.

To achieve this technically on a bass guitar, of course in the first place you have to master your right hand slapping fluency and accuracy. But the note length is controlled solely by muting with the left hand. And that's where I found it interesting to mimic those bass lines, to see how far you can go in note control.
In "Into The Groove" you see me muting every single note, by quickly lifting the left hand fingers. It boggles my mind as well that it is humanly possible to play like this at that speed, but apparantly I manage to, once I get into the flow.

Techniques to mimic synth bass lines are certainly an enrichment for a bass players toolkit... so I suggest you try it out as well !

Recorded on vintage Fender Jazz Bass 78/80, mid-old roundwounds, tuned 1 1/2 note down, for extra reach and the additional extra "growl".
Direct into Boss mixing console into Audiobox 22VSL into Microsoft Surface into TotalRecorder.
No amp, effects, limiter, compressor or any pre-or postprocessing. Only added treble +10 on the mixing console for bass brightness.
Backing tracks taken from YT.
Bass solo accompanying parts cut and looped from the originals, except In My System composed and mixed a loop using Linn samples from the net.