Online Bass Guitar Lessons: Learn Without Frustration
Are you serious about wanting to improve you bass guitar playing? If you are, then one of the most productive things you can do is work on your scales. It has even been said that the level of your scale playing pretty much determines the level of your bass playing overall! I have designed these exercises to help you to develop a more accurate sense of rhythm and to improve the speed and agility of your bass guitar scales.
Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.
Beginner bass players should learn scales right away to save them years of time, trouble and frustration, but that most often never happens for them. Intermediate bass players have to have some patterns under their belt to even be at an intermediate level, however, they are usually the most frustrated players because they feel like they are getting somewhere with their instrument, but the are so held up with partial information that they can’t move beyond where they are at.
Before you begin to play the exercises, you might want to set your metronome at 60 and practice clapping each of these rhythm–2 notes per beat, 3 notes per beat, and 4 notes per beat. The exercises consist of playing your scales with a metronome in each of these rhythms. Here is how to play them:
The goal is to be able to play all the exercises at 100 beats per minute. When you are able to do that, it will be fairly easy to further increase the tempo. Here is a suggestion for advanced practice: Try to play all the way through all three exercises without stopping in between. When you do this, the last note of the eighth note exercise will become the first note of the triplet exercise.
Even if you don’t end up going anywhere major with your new found skills, you will still feel great and be proud of yourself for learning something new. The bass guitar is fun, and adding these skills to your repertoire will help you to begin developing your own unique playing style.
Keep the end of the thumb of your left hand in the middle of the back of the bass neck. Keep your left thumb perpendicular to the neck. When reaching for notes, don’t let your thumb go parallel to the neck; shift position instead
So, now that you have the basic steps on hand position for playing your bass guitar. Now, what you’ve got to do is learn some other basic stuff, like scales, techniques and song. Be sure that you actually WANT to learn and don’t let the frustration discourage you!
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