Any tips for someone wanting to just starting to learn bass?

Any tips for someone wanting to just starting to learn bass?

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Use a pick

Don't use a pick

Practice basic chords like D, G and Am

G, Em, C, and D chords. All you need.

Learn the fretboard and intervals. That's it.

Ok, basics first; learn the proper way of holding a bass; be sure that you're gonna dedicate yourself to it. Learn how to find notes in the bass. Figure out how to play songs by ear (it's not the most fun thing in the world, but it gives you a nice feeling when you do manage). Don't overextend yourself, if you'd like to take some rest, by all means do, even if it's just 10 minutes. Learn how to practice slowly, and then ramp speed up. Practice with a metronome, or if you'd like, a drum track that's on loop. Learn harmony theory, practice rhythm and scales. Understand your role in the band and how to fullfill it. Change your strings, it helps.

listen to rush

We don't want OP's fingers to fall off.

Above all, get a solid sense of rhythm. Scales/arpeggios/melody-oriented shit is fucking worthless if you can't keep a groove or lock in with a drummer. People who talk about focusing on scales and shit are doing you a disservice if you're just starting out. Just stick to roots for now, unless you're learning specific lines.

Play with a drummer as often as possible and pay attention to what they're doing with a kick drum. If you're out of sync with the kick, it will sound wonky and muddy. But if you're locked in, there's a distinct "push" that sounds bigger and tighter. Hard to really explain, but you really only learn it from experience.

Oh yeah, definitely. I was the guy that made the proper post up there, but really I found the bass rhythm to be quite natural if you do manage to play with a drummer because your ears will detect what's right and what's wrong quite easily. It's definitely more of a rhythmic instrument than a pure harmonic or melodic one.

Bass is one of the more interplay based instruments. You have to take note of what everyone is doing, the drummer being one of the main ones but you can't purely ignore the guitarrists or even a pianist. If by all means you must, practice with a backing track, though it's better to practice with a few mates.

wear it high

>Play with a drummer as often as possible
Absolute best advice. Metronomes are fine, but there's no substitute for a drummer. Never played with a drummer for the first two years since I started playing since I lived in a farm in the middle of nowhere, and it took a bit of getting used to actually playing with other musicians, After a while, you should hopefully feel comfortable slotting in nicely between the guitarist/pianist and drummer in a band context.

Totally agreed on the interplay aspect.

I put such a big stress on rhythm because it's a point that gets neglected (especially on Sup Forums) in comparison to the melodic aspects. Partly I wonder if it's just guitarists who don't really understand the bass's role and think they "get" bass because the note layout is so similar. Plus it's a much more intuitive thing compared to the melodic aspect, and harder to describe/instruct without straight up showing someone.

Yeah, one of my favorite exercises when practicing is to just play roots in a classic 12 bar blues and think of new ways to take on the rhythm while being in synch with the kick drum, since you can really shape how a song sounds purely by changing the rhythm but still keeping it in sync, if it makes any sense.

Definitely, that's kind of what I was trying to get at in my first post, that you can find a lot of things to study just from playing roots, and getting hung up on melodic things that might distract you from the rhythm. Not sure if I conveyed that well up there, glad you brought it up and hopeful it makes sense to the OP.

What kind of stuff do you mainly play?

I'm pretty much just doing stuff on the side right now as a gig musician for whoever needs a bassist near my college but my high school band essentially played skagaze. But I really just wanted to play indie prog with jazz and shoegaze influences. Oh well.

Victor Wooten

>fingers/pick really just come to preference, in general you get more attack with a pick and playing faster is easier, but fingers are gonna give you a more warm tone with less attack(but you can also bat at the strings to imitate that attack."
>Learn your place between drums/guitar/whatever
>bass is a really fun instrument, especially when you realize how much you can do beyond "root note of guitar chord."
>A few basic scales is all that's really necessary to know.

Nice dude. That kind of work can be dry, but it's still valuable experience (and hopefully pays enough to be worth it).

It's really something I'm doing on the side that helps me pay my bills since I moved out of the country and although my parents are paying for most of my college tuition, the rest is on me. Other than my usual job to pay the bills (working at a local restaurant as a cashier), that work on the side's really been rounding the bills out.

Music is a hobby for me even though I've been studying piano since I was 8 and bass since I was 13. I'll probably drop the sideman work if I join a band.

bump

try reggae bass

myage by descendents

Can I use my guitar as a bass?

with a polyphonic pitch shifter yeah

on each string play 1234 then 2345 3456 etc up to the 12th fret then back down again, 3 sets of 15 and drink a protein shake after, every day

>step 1) buy bass
>step 2) stickerbomb it to fuck
Congratz now you play bass

sadistic and not even very useful for a beginner

is that u anthony?

Not OP, but any advice on actually using 1 finger per fret system below the 5th fret without intense pain after 20 minutes? For example, C Major.

I can't stretch my hand that much without buzzing or my thumb hurting from the pressure I put behind the neck. I can play C Major almost effortlessly starting on the 8th fret (?), but anything below the 5th is just pain.

if you're looking for a booklet to help you start and read music, get the Hal Leonards Bass Method book I II & III
here's a download link:
mediafire.com/file/sayviwqxfcxfjon/Bass Method - Books I, II & III (Hal Leonard).pdf
i prefer the physical copy.
come join us over at /gg/ if you enjoy mental abuse

i would never learn an instrument that cant play chords

in before someone posts some isolated case of someone using a bass as their harmonic instrument

take lessons. you will pick up bad habits otherwise. you can stick with it for a few months and then start self-teaching when you've got a solid basis.

practice multiple techniques (plucking, picking, slapping, tapping and whatever fads pop up over the year if you want)

spend equal time on technique and theory.

bass is a polyphonic instrument. chords on it will usually sound like muddy shit but if you play higher on the neck or use huge intervals they can sound phenomenal. Autumn Leaves transposed to bass is something else alright.

>b-but most players don't use them
most bass players are worthless

>that feel when you only got into Pastorius recently
>that feel when listning to Continnum for the first time

>that feel when trying to play Come On Come Over and hating yourself

yeah you gotta do arpeggios. still theres no point in maining bass

just learn guitar and bass is a natural extension of that

you are talking out of your ass mate

t. mains bass

fucking classic. how does it feel to be literally musically subhuman, by your own choice?

why are you so bitter

you are being grossly trolled and taking the bait

I'll take any excuse to bump this thread

yeah you're right i am being pretty condescending right now, sorry. you should learn something else though man, i couldnt imagine maining bass that would be boring as fuck

you're improving

6/10

I've played both guitar and bass extensively and I find the latter to be a lot more gratifying and fun

but that's subjective

fuck off mate not every argument has to be le epic trole

I miss the Sup Forums from before all this cancer began but it's basically been a decade by now so I guess I'm an idiot for continuing to come here

how to practice rhythm

i already play guitar so alerady know the melodic and scale stuff

Turn on a click or a drum track, play along. Not that hard.

the thing about trolling is that no one admits they're doing it. So yeah, you are trolling.

actually learn notes and figure things out by ear, not just tabs

Confirming, more stickers = better tone

Is the bass actually easy to learn? I know the story with Kim Deal of the Pixies having never played an instrument when she applied, and within a few months she was taught to play bass.

Don't just down pick

Akimbo has a lot of strumming on the bass and it's fucking sick

I use them occasionally as the need arises. It can be quite dramatic, especially in a 3 piece.

motorhead

Low barrier of entry, but as you get better and better it tends to get harder than other instruments just because of how much it is interplay based. Someone can just play rootnotes for hours on end in sync with the drums, and that's going to sound perfectly ok, but as you get better and have more impact you'l notice it becomes far more difficult to show off what you can do while still serving the band.

anybody can learn anything to a degree, but there can be so much more to bass than merely plunking away at root notes. It's a great instrument, and it's potential is only limited by ones desire to master it.

Unless you have fucking huge hands, I wouldn't suggest 1 finger per fret that low on the fretboard. It may seem simpler and more efficient, but it just doesn't work out practically for most people. Like you mentioned, it adds a lot more strain that is in almost all cases, unnecessary.

This is one of the big technical distinctions between guitar and bass that people overlook (especially if they mainly play guitar). If you think I'm making shit up, the Hal Leonard books ( posted) specifically take this approach on the lower fretboard (it suggests 1st, 2nd, 4th fingers down there). It's a great intro bass series in other ways also.

I have quite big hands and a thin bass neck and while I can definitely play it with 1 finger per fret near there, I definitely end up shuffling and sliding my hand around a bit, and I'm someone who has trouble with guitars for being too small.

The most important thing with bass is learning how to hold it properly - the wrist is one of the places that's most easy to fuck on the fretboard hand. Be very careful with that.

play what.

Root notes, or going up and down a scale in time. It's really just to get you to stay on time rather than to sound like good music. Though, if you do want a reccomendation - the bass line to Psycho Killer is basically that with a slight variation for most of the song, save for the chorus and the part where it goes French.

mindblowingly stupid comment

Don't be afraid to catch feels.

In all seriousness though, its 99% (possibly more) about locking with the kick.
Think rhythm section not "low guitar".

Not op but i also have a question, what is the best way to learn all the notes on bass?

Besides learning to read notation (Hal Leonard Method posted above is a good starting point), this was really helpful for me starting out:

With a metronome (seriously, if you don't do this, you're fucking yourself), play, in quarter notes (or half notes if necessary), every E on the bass from low to high, as in (sorry anti-tab snobs):

---------------------------------9---21---
-----------------------2---14-------------
-----------7---19-------------------------
0---12------------------------------------

Repeat this for all 12 notes. I like to go in fourths usually (so the next note is A, then D, then G, etc.), but other methods work too. Only takes a few minutes, and if you do it every day for a while the note locations really start to sink in.

It makes more sense if you can visualize a piano. Anyway, the bass behaves chromatically like every instrument, we just don't notice that.because all we really learn is the major scale.

On a typical 4-string bass, the lowest note is tuned to E, which means that if you play it while not pressing anything on the fret you basically have the note E. You can then ascend cromatically in F (1st fret), F# (2nd), G (3rd), G# (4th), A (5th), A# (6th), B (7th), C (8th), C# (9th), D (10th), D# (11th), E (12th) again - but this E is an octave higher.

And you essentially figure that out following the patterns and tuning. And that's it.