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Learn How To Play Bass Guitar: Improve Your Playing

by Simeon Blackstock

Bass Lessons are available in all kinds of formats these days audio, video, book and even on-line. No matter what type of media you choose to start your journey to learning how to play bass you must always concentrate on the fundamentals no matter what your skill level.

Even a professional like Tiger Woods has a teacher or a coach that makes sure he never looses site of the foundations that built his golf game to what it is today. This article will touch on three things that a bass player playing the bass must always lock in to memory and never forget: Hand Positioning, Wrist Movement, and Thumb Attack.

Take a regular guitar (which is tuned from the thickest to the lowest string- E – A – D – G – B – E) and exclude the two thinnest strings at the bottom and what is left is basically a bass guitar with thinner strings. Bass playing is usually note-oriented and not chord-oriented. This means that single notes are hit more often in bass playing and this scheme is the essential element of bass playing, one should be familiar with the tunings and the notes in a regular guitar to be able to decently play the bass guitar.

In struggling simply to get out the notes, though, it’s easy to neglect developing the hand’s small muscles. The result can be a great deal of wasted energy and motion, limiting one’s technique. So here’s a few suggestions about the slap technique:

Feel the beat, playing the bass guitar differs primarily from playing a regular guitar because it entails an emphasis on the beat of the music. One can compare the bass guitar into a drum or percussion set that is made into a guitar. Beats are very important in playing bass guitar because this type of guitar gives depth and timing to any song.

Set the metronome for 60 beats per minute. Choose a scale (pentatonic minor is a good one to begin with) and play the scale all the way through TWICE using eighth notes. This means that you play 2 notes for every metronome beat.

Also, crucial to slap bass is the “snapping” sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard – this is called “popping”. Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics – but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.

Not only do they need to know the right pattern to use and how to execute them in many different ways, but they also need to know how to practice with them. Regular practice with the proper set of fretboard patterns is a necessary component of becoming a seasoned player, time must be spent with practice, but it is important to know how to practice so that hours a day are not spent with insufficient result.

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