Self-teaching on bass is absolutely viable (plenty of great players have gotten there with YouTube, method books, and patient time), and lessons mostly exist to fix what self-learners tend to miss, things like technique blind spots, practice habits that stick, and ear training. I have been teaching since 1985, and I still take lessons myself with my current teacher Kevin Bales, so I'm not pushing one side over the other. Both do some things well, both fall short somewhere, and most working musicians end up using both.
What self-teaching does well
Self-teaching has real strengths, and I do not want to gloss over them.
You set your own pace. If a concept clicks in ten minutes, you move on, and if it takes a month, nobody is rushing you. There is no schedule to coordinate, no travel, no weekly fee. You can follow your curiosity wherever it goes (deep into one song, one player, one style) without asking permission. You learn to find your own answers, which is a skill in itself. The amount of free, high-quality material available today is genuinely remarkable. Between YouTube lessons, transcription videos, method books, forum discussions, and play-along tracks, a motivated self-learner has more at their fingertips than I did with a full stack of records and a cassette deck in the 1980s, and honestly I am a little jealous!!
Plenty of great players are largely self-taught. Self-teaching builds a kind of independence and problem-solving muscle that does not come from anywhere else.
What self-teaching tends to miss
The tradeoff is that self-teaching has blind spots built into it. It has nothing to do with how hard you work.
The biggest is that you cannot see yourself objectively. Think about a left-hand thumb creeping up over the neck, right-hand tension in the forearm, or a wrist angle that will cause pain in ten years. Those are the kinds of issues a player often cannot feel until something starts hurting. Timing drift against a metronome, the subtle rush going into the chorus, a groove that sits a hair on top of the beat when it should be laid back, all of that is very hard to hear on yourself in the moment.
The second is plateau diagnosis. When progress slows, it is genuinely difficult to know what the one thing is that is holding you back. Self-learners often respond by working harder on what they already do well, because that is the part that feels good.
The third is that practice sessions tend to go in circles. Without a curriculum, the path of least resistance is to play through the stuff you already mostly know. Reading usually gets skipped entirely. Ear training rarely gets done in any systematic way. Weak areas get quietly avoided. That isn't laziness. It's what happens when you're your only guide.
What lessons actually add
The first thing a good teacher gives you is a set of eyes on your playing that you do not have yourself. I can watch a student play and see things they cannot see, posture, hand position, where the tension lives, what the timing is doing under a specific chord change. That live feedback, in the moment, is the thing that is genuinely hard to replicate alone.
Second is diagnosis. After forty-plus years of watching bass players, I can usually spot the one thing holding a student back inside the first lesson or two. That's not magic at all, it's just having seen the same thing a few thousand times.
Third is a scaffolded curriculum instead of a random YouTube playlist. Groove, technique, reading, ear training, arpeggios and scales, repertoire, all of that is interconnected, and the order you work on them matters. A lesson plan sequences them so each piece supports the next.
Fourth is accountability. Showing up once a week, with something to play, is a quietly powerful structure. It puts a deadline on your practice, which is usually the part that's missing.
None of this is a beginners-only thing. I still take lessons with Kevin Bales, and working with him recently reshaped how I think about walking bass lines. After decades of building them more from scale tones, I realized I needed to think more in chord tones. That kind of insight is exactly what another set of ears gets you, and after forty years of teaching I am still getting it!!
Common self-taught gaps I see
When a long-time self-taught player comes to me, there are patterns that show up again and again. I list these not as criticism, but so you can check your own playing against them:
- Left-hand thumb creeping over the top of the neck. Feels natural, quietly limits reach and creates tension up the arm.
- Right-hand tension. Squeezing the strings harder than needed, forearm tight, shoulder raised. It caps your speed and endurance.
- Reading completely absent, even after years of playing. Not a problem if you never plan to read a chart, but a real problem if you ever want to.
- Ear training skipped. Most self-learners can play what is on the page or what they memorized from a video, but struggle to play what they hear in their head.
- Practice sessions with no clear goal. Pick up the bass, noodle, play three songs, put it down. That's a pleasant hour, but it is not really progress.
- Avoiding weak areas. Everybody does this. Without outside input, there is no force pulling you back toward the things you do not yet do well.
None of that is about character. It is the natural outcome of working on your own, with nobody else watching what your hands are doing.
When self-teaching is the right call
Self-teaching genuinely is the right choice in some situations:
- You are cost-constrained. Free and low-cost resources will absolutely get you started, and there is no shame in that being the right tool for right now.
- You have strong learning discipline and a good ear. Some people are naturally good at self-directing, and they thrive on it.
- You are an intermediate player on another instrument adding bass as a second voice. Much of the musicianship transfers.
- You are in a short-term no-teachers situation. Travel, schedule, a temporary season of life, carry on now and revisit lessons later.
When lessons are the right call
Lessons are the right call when the thing you need is feedback, diagnosis, or structure:
- You have hit a plateau and cannot figure out why.
- You have a specific goal with a deadline, maybe a wedding gig in six months, stepping into a jazz ensemble, auditioning for something, or learning to read for studio work.
- You can feel a technique issue but cannot name it. Something hurts, or something in your playing feels wrong, and you cannot see it from the inside.
- You want to stop spinning. You have been practicing for years, you are not sure you are getting better, and you want someone to point at the actual next step.
The hybrid most people end up at
In practice, almost every working musician I know operates in a hybrid. Weekly or biweekly lessons with a teacher, daily self-directed practice on the material from those lessons, and curated YouTube and recordings as ongoing supplement. Lessons don't replace your own practice, they tell you what to work on and why, and the practice is still yours to do.
Quick comparison
| Self-teaching | Lessons | |
|---|---|---|
| Pace | Fully yours | Collaborative, goal-driven |
| Cost | Free to low | Per-lesson fee |
| Feedback | Self-assessed (delayed, partial) | Live, from someone who has seen it before |
| Structure | You build it (or don't) | Scaffolded curriculum |
| Range of material | Enormous, unfiltered | Curated, sequenced |
| Typical plateau | Hard to diagnose alone | Diagnosed and addressed directly |
Closing thought
If you are self-taught and proud of it, that is great, and you should be proud, because the work you have done is real!! If you are self-taught and stuck, that's just what happens when nobody else has eyes on your playing, and a few lessons will often get you past a year of frustrated practice, and then you go right back to your own work. The scaffolding shows up in how you think about what an exercise is for and in how you practice the way you plan to play. Those are the kinds of structural ideas that are easy to miss on your own and hard to un-learn once you have them.
Practice method, technique, and ear training are some of the fundamentals I teach. If you have been self-taught and feel stuck, online bass lessons via Zoom are available, one hour or two hours, weekly, biweekly, or as a floater, worldwide.