So You Want to Learn Bass Guitar?

So you want to learn bass guitar? Many people do, but find it difficult to get a book on bass guitar, especially one with an accompanying CD. A lot depends on the style you want to play, and whether you want to be a new Duane Eddy or just to play in a cover band. However, if you really want to play, the principles that apply to any other style of guitar also apply to you.

If you intend to learn with a book, try to get one with an accompanying CD so that you can get some audio as well as written visual help. It's one thing being shown what to do and following written instructions, but quite another actually doing it, and making it sound right. Especially if you don't know what it should sound like because you can read a book, but can't hear it.

Learning bass involves different skills to those needed to play rhythm or lead guitar, since you will generally be setting the beat along with the drummer. You might have to play solo, but not at the high rate of solo lead, and will have less need of the specialist techniques that enable a player to play lightning fast riffs. However, you will need a knowledge of your frets, and many bass guitar players prefer to play without a fret because they find it easier and less constrictive.

You will have to learn the same basics, such as the various parts of your guitar, and how they contribute to the music. You will also have to learn how to tune your guitar to different keys, and how to play the various scales. Scales are very important to you because they are the basis behind the vast majority of your work. You will have less need of chords, and more of scales. You will have to know every note that your instrument is capable of playing, and how to get the best pure sound out of each and every one of them.

Spider walking is one of the techniques that you will be able to use, and there are others. But how are you to learn all of these things? Where does a bass guitarist go for lessons, other than to another bass guitarist? Many just teach themselves through continual practice by ear, and by listening to tracks of other bass guitarists. However, they are unlikely ever to be better than those they listen to without expert tuition that opens up the instrument and its possibilities to them. There are ways to learn without finding the right books. In fact you have two major options, apart from books and CDs.

1. Videos.
Video bass guitar lessons are very useful in that you not only see what you should be doing, but also what it should sound like. Advanced techniques can be designed to provide subtle nuances in tonal quality, and various sound effects, but unless you can hear what you are trying to achieve you would have no way knowing if you had succeeded or not. Video can achieve what a guitar tuition book cannot, and even more than an a book with accompanying CD.

2. Membership Sites
The problem with a straight video is that once you have covered the content, there is no more. A guitar membership site, however, offers you ever-changing content, and the option of a number of different teachers according to the style you want to play: blues, pop, heavy metal, rock country and so on, and also the type of guitar you want to specialize in: bass, electric or classical being the most common.

Once you have completed a sequence of lessons in one style, you could then progress to another, and end up a very versatile guitarist. You can also focus on playing techniques as opposed to learning chords and scales, and play to many of the tracks that such sites offer. You can also lapse your membership once you have reached your desired level so you pay only what is needed for you to become an accomplished guitarist.00004000

Whichever way you choose: the one-off payment for a bass guitar tuition video or the monthly membership offering continual bass guitar teaching in all aspects of playing bass, you will find it easier than simply learning from a book. While the latter was the way that most of the more established guitarists learned when they didn't just teach themselves, there is no longer any need to go the old fashioned way.

If you want to learn bass guitar take the individual DVD or online video route. This is the 21st century, and video rules, OK?

If you are serious about learning bass guitar, click on iJamplay where you will find a membership site offering everything mentioned in this article, and allow you to learn bass in a very short time.

Read Want to Learn bassGuitar and other articles on my blog.