Bass Lessons - Page 31

Our Facebook friend Ryan Pusiak posted a question on our Facebook page, asking about the best way to go about converting a fretted bass into a fretless one. So we decided it was a great opportunity to feature the series from Jason Holder, one of the guys at The Musician’s Den in Evansville, Indiana. Jason really breaks down the process...

Continuing our series on slap bass, today we’ll combine several of the elements from the first five lessons in this series, and add “octaves” to the mix. FYI, in this lesson, I’m paying a Shergold Modulator bass. If anyone know where to get modules for it, please let me know in the comments below. Check out the entire Slap Bass...

Today, we continue the Slap Bass 101 series, adding the basic “funk/rock scale” – the minor pentatonic, with trills, to what we’ve learned so far. Check out the entire Slap Bass 101 series: Part 1: Slap Bass Introduction Part 2 – Building on the Basics Part 3 – Left Hand Slap & Hammer-Ons Part 4 – Right Hand Pluck/Pop

In this lesson, we’ll build on the concepts in Part 3 and add the right hand pluck/pop. Next time: Funk/Rock Scale Basics! In case you missed them, here are Parts 1-3: Part 1: Slap Bass Introduction Part 2: Building on the Basics Part 3: Left Hand Slap & Hammer-Ons

This week, we continue building on the foundation established in Part 1 (the basics) and Part 2 (building on the basics), and add left hand slap concepts and hammer-ons. Next: Right hand pluck and pop

Last time, we covered the basics in my introduction to slap bass lesson. This week, we’re going to build on the concepts of the introduction, covering basic thumb slapping, ghosted notes, muting and offbeat bass lines. Next: Part 3 – left hand slap and hammer-ons.

By popular demand, I’ve been working on a new lesson series for beginning slap bass. This week, we’ll break down the basics. Part 1: Slap Bass Introduction This lesson covers basic thumb slapping, ghosted notes, muting, hammer-ons and plucking/popping: Next: we’ll build on these concepts with Part 2 – Building on the Basics.

In this lesson we’ll explore the basic forms of Bebop scales so you can start getting the patterns down and experiment with them in your music. There are times when you solo that you may want to do a scale run over a chord. Have you ever noticed that a straight descending scale run as eighth notes over a chord...

One exciting way of use a looping device with your bass is to enhance a composition. A recorded phrase can become a backbone over which to improvise. For example, a phrase can take the form of a tapped rhythm (e.g. using muted strings), a short rhythmic phrase lasting only one or two bars or a longer phrase dependent on your...

In the last tetrachord lesson we went over the concept of tetrachords and how they change the way we think about scale patterns. In that lesson the focus was the major modes and a question was posted asking about the melodic minor and harmonic minor modes. Therefore this week’s article will go over tetrachords in the melodic minor and how...

I was in a music retail outlet recently where I purchased a Boss RC-20XL Loop Station. A great piece of kit, a glowing review of which I will post separately. What occurred to me, as the eager shop assistant demo’d the device, was that live looping may have become a little typecast in the minds of many musicians; i.e. a...

We normally think of scales in terms of eight-note patterns and treat them as a unit. There are the standard modal forms for both major and minor, the bop variations, blues variations, but all of these still cling to the paradigm of an octave based scale unit (even if the total number of notes in the scale changes). As bassists...