Bass Lessons - Page 31
Untold Secret to Melodic Bass lesson: Anchors, Pivots and Lead-Ins
This is the first chapter of “The Untold Secret to Melodic Bass.” Be sure to check out Jon’s previous lesson, Melodic Bass Lines, as well as the complete The Untold Secret to Melodic Bass in downloadable PDF or Kindle Book formats. I hope you, the bassist-reader, find the material useful; it’s an approach to the construction of bass lines based...
Power Lesson #1: Two Handed Tapping
This is the first in a series of three lessons from my new online course Contemporary Techniques For Bass Guitar. This lesson is an excerpt from my new book/DVD, Tapestry, which is scheduled for release in September. The song illustrated here is called Ebenella and was written by a good friend of mine, Rob Gourlay. These techniques are the same...
Melodic Bass Lines
We’ve all heard about “chordal scales.” Chordal scales are useful; they contain the chord tones—we really need those!—and a set of neighbor and passing tones that will sound reasonably and reliably good. Chordal scales are emphasized in a lot of teaching methods. Are they the basis of what we need to know as bass players? Do we make our lines...
Metronome Madness
One of the biggest creeds for bassists is “thou shalt worship thy metronome” (it comes right after “thou shalt be the sexiest member in the band”), and with good reason. Sexiness aside, we are the foundation, both harmonically and metrically, for the rest of the band. We’re the pulse. These exercises will help you get more mileage out of your...
Lesson: Double Thumb Technique
There are a ton of Youtube videos out there with amazing bassists using this technique. Want to learn how? As a disclaimer, this takes a lot of time to get to a functional level, I spent 4 months of consistent practice before I was able to use it. That being said, the technique is totally learnable with regular practice, this...
Mike Flynn: Four-Finger Picking Lesson
London-based bassist Mike Flynn has mastered the four-finger picking style, and he’s posted a video to demonstrate it for the rest of us. Mike shares, “I’ve been trying to get it for a while and as I already do the Wooten stuff that involves using two finger pluck with the index and middle fingers on your picking hand – it...