Josh Cohen Publishes “Tapping Grooves: Vol 1”

Josh Cohen: Tapping Grooves: Vol. 1If you’ve been following No Treble for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve seen videos of Josh Cohen playing some mind-bending bass tapping. (He also wrote a four-part series on tapping for us.) Now he’s released a transcription and play-along book on the subject for four, five, and six-string basses.

Tapping Grooves: Vol. 1 teaches you how to use the technique over 27 different examples of varying styles.

“These grooves are intended to show the modern bass player how to use tapping techniques to create multi-layered polyphonic grooves that emulate the sound of entire rhythm section,” the author explains. “Each of the grooves contained in this book comes with access to unique play-along recordings featuring both a sample of the groove and a drum/percussion track in which practice your own playing!”

The 61-page Tapping Grooves: Vol. 1 is available now through Amazon. Until you pick up your copy, check out Cohen performing Bach’s “Fugue No. 2 in C Minor”:

Get daily bass updates.

Get the latest news, videos, lessons, and more in your inbox every morning.

Leave a Reply to Teacher Cancel reply

  1. The Amazon page doesnt reveal any internal pages and doesnt seem to allow questions for now.
    What I want to know is Is this book in standard music notation, the dreaded tablature or both?
    I hope more book writers leave out the tab and only write in standard music notation (notes) as it is easier to learn and memorize and more advantageous to the player.

    • Got my answer, its Tab and Notation.
      Would love to know if they are atleast organized by complete tab, and complete notation on separate pages. When its tab and notation on the page that makes a book unusable so hopefully its not the dread tab under notation which takes up space and is distracting.. we will see. Still seems like an amazing resource. I just loathe tablature

      • It turned out to be stacked notation and tab instead of having them separate.
        So while beginners may enjoy this book. It is truly distracting as a music read for anyone who reads sheet music. I like Josh and the material but the presentation of stacked tab&notation is ugly and distracting.

    • Teacher

      I don’t see it as black and white as you do.
      Tabs are an amazing tool for bass/guitar because they actually show the exact position where a note should be played – which is very important for a book like this.

      I do agree that just knowing tabs is very bad and you should focus on learning to read sheets without tabs but in this case it’s really justified imo

      • Actually the flexibility of interpretation is an advantage of reading music. You can put the notes and melodies in a few places and explore the timbral qualities as well as increase your musical fluency.

        Tabs are a crutch. They are good for transcribing stuff on the fly for a student. But I think they also are generally not going to help students achieve a high level of mastery.

        You are right, tabs have a place.
        They are just distracting and cause the music to take up alot of space when interlaced with notation instead of placed on adjacent pages, or one and then the other afterward, which would both be neater and faster to read and play