9 posts
Switching from guitar to bass, most of your fingerboard knowledge, chord knowledge, and ear carry straight over. What does not carry over is the job itself. Bass supports the song and locks with the drums instead of fronting it, and that shift in role is the real work.
Running one-octave scales up and down forever isn't how you'll actually use them on the bass. Scales match chords, and the real job is knowing where every scale note lives on the fingerboard. In this lesson I walk through my number system, scale degrees 1-7 organized into box shapes that transpose to any key, so the neck opens up.
Slap is a technique rather than a style, and you can play funk with a pick or with your fingers just as well. Everything works around the double-thumb angle, and once you let that be king, your regular thumb, pops, and hand position all fall in line. In this lesson I set up the right hand for efficient slap playing.
The 6-string bass adds a low B and a high C, which means two more strings ringing out while you're trying to play cleanly. Most of the noise problems on this instrument come down to right-hand form and thumb-muting habits. This lesson sets up the hand so the strings you aren't playing stay quiet.
The extra string on a 5-string bass makes string noise your biggest enemy, and clean playing depends almost entirely on your right hand. This lesson sets up your thumb, finger mechanics, and left-hand damping so the strings you aren't playing stay quiet, with three exercises to drill the form on open strings.
Triads are the basis of every bass line, covering chord structure, harmony, and the notes you choose. I used to teach scales first, and I have come to see that triads are the real key, with scale notes as ways to connect them.
I look at music as a language, and notes as its alphabet. Scales are how musicians organize that information so they can catalog their harmonic choices. In chord-scale theory it's a match game, and the notes you choose come from the scale that fits the chord. Knowing every note of a scale across the fingerboard matters, not just a couple of pattern shapes.
What is music? It's a language, a system of sound with its own vocabulary, grammar, and meaning, as Victor Wooten has shown many players. Treating music that way changes how you practice, because you're not memorizing notes, you're learning to say something. Far too many musicians still don't treat it that way.
When working on a bass exercise, get the mechanics right (fingering, timing, coordination), but don't spend too much time on the exercise in isolation. Balance academic work with applying the exercise inside real music. At some point you need to trust that you know the alphabet and start talking.
Online bass lessons via Zoom for students of any level. Reach out to talk through your goals.
