Have you decided whether to use your fingers to play bass? If you prefer to use a pick, you should experiment a little, starting with heavy ones. Also you might not know that there are lots of types of bass guitars to choose from. You can get four, five or six string basses that offer you a variety of ways to express yourself.

This video will give you a grounding in the parts of a bass guitar:

And here is a video showing you how to play a walking bass line:

Here are some basic bass guitar tips that you need to remind yourself of every day.

Incoming search terms for the article:

• freee tutorials how to play a five string bass guitar (1)
• walking the bass guitar (1)

Technorati Tags: Jack Bruce, bass guitar

You will need a bass guitar case. If you are actually going to be transporting your bass guitar to different places for practice or for gigs it is best not to go for one of the cheaper cases. They’re a bit on the thin side. Spend a little more money and get a case that has a hard outer shell and some padding inside.

Bass guitar strings come in several types: roundwound, groundwound and flatwound. The most common are roundwound which have quite a bright sound and can be used in all styles of bass guitar playing. Reggae or jazz bass guitar players usually prefer a fairly mellow sound so they will often choose flatwound bass strings. Groundwound strings are preferred by bass guitarists who do not like the finger noise that you get with the other two kinds of strings, and they don’t have the extremely bright or totally mellow sound of flats or rounds. Whichever kind of string you use, buy a spare set or two. If you have not made a final decision yet, buy a set of each kind of string to try them out.

You will need a guitar strap. They are made from vinyl, polyester or leather. Your guitar will probably have one but you might see something in the store that you prefer. There’s not a whole lot of difference between the different types of guitar straps, so just make a personal choice.

There is one bass guitar basic accessory that you can go crazy over, and it’s picks. Bass guitar picks are cheap and come in many shapes, sizes and colors, a lot like the girls who will be attracted to you when you start playing bass in a band.

A strict rule that all guitar players should impose on themselves is to keep your instrument in tune all the time. You can do it by installing a free tuner on your computer but if you are going to be travelling to gigs then buy one when you purchase your bass guitar. Just get a cheap one to start with. They come in a wide range of prices but they all do the same job.

Technorati Tags: bass guitar basic

Just in case you don’t listen too closely to music, the bass guitar gives the music those heavy, low notes. You’ll find them in jazz, blues, pop, latin. There isn’t a modern musical genre where you won’t find bass lines churned out by the electric bass guitar. Every musical style has its own way of interpreting bass lines.

Sometimes a guy will take up the guitar, learn some rock and some blues. He’ll learn the minor pentatonic scale, buy some guitar effects and see how they sound. Then he tries bass guitar. A guitar player who decides to learn to play bass is often a guy who wants to get a good grounding in music. He wants to learn all aspects of playing. Once a guitar player has played a little bass he will have a better understanding of what he’s doing in a band.

Of course, a bass guitar looks a lot like a regular electric guitar. It might even have the same number of strings but mostly it has four. The strings on a four string bass play the notes E A D G, the same as a regular guitar but an octave lower. You can play a regular electric guitar without an amplifier and it will still sound somewhat like a guitar. If you don’t plug your bass guitar in it won’t sound like much. If you can read music you will notice that the bass lines are written in the bass clef only one octave higher than the notes it actually makes.

If you can already play an electric guitar and you want to learn bass you have a start already but only time will tell how good you are going to be at being a bass player in a band. Your talents could lie in the direction of lead or rhythm playing, but if you give bass guitar playing a try, you will not be worse off for the experience.

Technorati Tags: bass guitar

The guitar has six strings while the bass has only four but the thicker strings on the bass make it more difficult to play. The choice of which notes to play is harder for a ball player. Once the band has departed from simple chords, playing the root note is not enough for the bass player.

Playing bass needs a completely different frame of mind which needs to be learned and practiced. The bass player does not just stand there and play in the background. He is supporting the drummer and the rhythm guitar player.

There are certain musical styles that are less complex than others. Take punk rock, for instance. You learn a few power chords and you are almost there. For bass players pop rock is not too difficult. Hard rock is more challenging, and genres based on the blues tradition offer the new guitar player a little more background to absorb before he can consider himself a player.

Some musical genres feature the bass in the role of a lead instrument. Funk rock, jazz, groove metal, soul or reggae all demand alot from the bass guitar player.

The fact is playing bass guitar or regular guitar is as easy as you allow it to be. People say that bass is easier to play, but the guitar student’s attitude can change that.

The main thing is your love for music and your wish to play and create music. If you can keep time, have some idea when to be a part of the group and when to be at the front, then you have a start to being a guitar or bass player. Once you start playing, how hard it is does not matter.

For the bass player who started out learning the guitar bass is usually easier to learn. That is because the guitar player already has a feel for the instrument, His body has already become used to fingering chords, playing scales and using a pick, so most bass players who started with the guitar will advise others to do the same.

The most practical approach to the question of whether bass or guitar is harder to play is to take a lesson or two in both. If you cannot afford lessons, check out the free guitar or bass lessons on the internet. Another way to decide is to watch guitar and bass players on YouTube. If your feelings go towards either the guitar or bass, then that is where the rest of you should go. Whether it is harder makes no difference.

Technorati Tags: bass or guitar is harder to play, Playing bass

There are two ways to learn bass online. One is to take advantage of the many free bass lessons on the web. These online bass guitar lessons will help you to understand how the place of the bass guitar in a band, music theory, reading sheet music and tabs as well as giving you basic rhythms to play. Some of the bass lessons you find will have some kind of interactive component where you can play along with riffs or a backing track. The other way is to look for bass guitar forums. If they are active they will have the kind of advice you will not get from lessons. talkbass is a good one, bassplayer.com is another, and basschat.co.uk will have answers to all kinds of questions on any aspect of bass guitar playing and associated gizmos.

Of course, many of the bass guitar lesson sites are offering paid courses, but there are also some good free lessons. If you do a search for “online bass guitar lessons” (without the quotes will give you more results) you will be able to compare the various paid lesson courses for bass guitarists, and you will get a chance to compare them with the free courses. If you decide to learn to play bass guitar for free you will probably need to find yourself some free bass guitar tabs on the internet. There are many places that offer bass tabs for popular songs. Another option for the bass guitar student on a budget is YouTube. If you go looking for online bass lessons on video you will probably find about a thousand clips, all offering something of value to the beginner.

As a bass player you must learn to play in time. A newbie guitar player can spend years playing guitar with the tempo and timing all over the place because he does not have to play with other musicians. The bass guitarist’s job is to play in a band so the sooner you get any little rhythmic or timing peccadillos ironed out, the better. For this you will need a metronome. Type “free metronome” into a search engine, find one you like and bookmark it if it is online, although there are metronomes you can download for free. The same goes for a tuner. There are quite good bass guitar tuners online. You will also be able to find free backing tracks for guitar online. Playing along to these is a great way to get the feel of playing in a band. You can tell the program what chords to play and the time signature, and you can play along to the looped backing track online or download it in mp3 format.

For more inspiration find video clips and mp3’s by leading bass guitar players like Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, Waylon Tisdale, John Pattitucci, Mike Mason or Miroslav Vitous. To finish off, here is a video featuring Les Claypool:

Technorati Tags: learning to play bass guitar, learn bass online

Here are the notes as they appear on the bass guitar fretboard:

G|—G#—|—A—|—A#—|—B—|—C—|—C#—|—D—|—D#—|—E—|—F—|

D|—D#—|—E—|—F—|—F#–|—G—|—G#—|—A—|—A#—|—B—-|—C—|

A|—A#—|—B—|—C—|—C#–|—D—|—D#—|—E—|—F—-|—F#—|—G—|

E|—F—-|—F#–|—G—|—G#–|—A—|—A#—|—B—|—C—-|—C#—|—D—|

You will notice that I have written the sharp symbol (#) on the diagram of the bass fretboard. You probably already know that one man’s sharp is another man’s flat according to which key the song is in. For instance F# could also be called Gb (G flat) because it is both the note above F and the note below G. Easy to understand but complicated to explain.

Usually you begin learning bass guitar by using the E and A strings to play the bass line of some easy songs. You could begin by simply memorizing where the notes are but it will help if you set yourself the task of learning a song or two. Your memory always appreciates some help from your body and your feelings, so trying to learn some songs will help you get the notes under your skin. You will note that I have only given you the first ten frets. You will see that this is one octave on each string. Once you have the notes on those frets off by heart, the remaining notes will be much easier to learn.

If you take a look at the diagram of the fretboard, you will see that the note at the fifth fret of the E string (A) is the note on the next open string, so once you play up to the fifth fret, you can either continue playing up the neck or you can start playing ate notes on the next string. If you have already learnt to play the guitar this will not be a surprise to you. Now that I have explained the basics, if your head is spinning a little, just go back to the simplicity of what you are learning: four strings, four octaves made up of seven notes.

Technorati Tags: bass guitar

There is a wide range of bass guitars with varying numbers of strings and a number of tuning options to widen the range of notes produced. We will stay with the four string bass guitar which is tuned to one octave lower than the standard guitar.

Most guitar players agree that the most effective way to begin tuning a guitar is to start with the strings tuned lower than you need and then tune them up to the right pitch. It is a good idea to start with the strings much lower than they need to be so you do not tighten them too much and break a string.

Let us look at tuning the bass guitar to a piano or keyboard. Find Middle C on the keyboard and go down two octaves and find the E below that. This is your note to tune the fourth string of your bass guitar. Play the open fourth string and the E on your piano at the same time. If you hear a sound like the noise a helicopter makes, your guitar is not in tune. Turn the tuning peg on your bass guitar as you play the guitar and the keyboard together, and listen to the “helicopter” sound. It will become slower as the guitar becomes in tune with the keyboard, and it will eventually vanish. Repeat this for your A D G strings.

Another way of tuning the bass guitar is to get the E string as close to tuned as you can and then tune the rest of the strings. Start by playing the note at the fifth fret of the E string together with the open A string. Once these two notes are the same, play the fifth fret of the A string at the same time as the D string open. When the D string sounds the same as the fifth fret on the A string, play the fifth fret of the D string and tune the open G string to that.

You can also tune the bass guitar to itself using harmonics. Touch your finger lightly on the fifth fret of the E string without pressing down. You will hear a chiming note. Now play this harmonic again but at the same time playing the harmonic at the seventh fret of the A string. Tune the A string until it matches the harmonic of the E string. Next play the fifth fret harmonic of the A string and match the seventh fret harmonic of the D string to that. Finally, match the seventh fret harmonic on the G string with the fifth fret harmonic on the D string.

The simplest way to tune the bass guitar is the electronic tuning method. Electronic tuners have a visual way to tell you when your bass is sounding the right note. For the sake of your progress as a guitarist you should first learn to tune the bass guitar using one or all of the other methods, then check it with an electronic tuner. You can buy an electronic tuner at a music store or online. You can find an online bass guitar tuner here and a versatile bass guitar tuner at get-tuned.com

Here is a video lesson on tuning the bass guitar:

So how do you begin to learn to play bass guitar? Just the same as if you were learning the regular guitar. Take lessons for a while. Get the callouses on your fingers and learn the notes on the fretboard. As a bass guitar can be played with either a plectrum or with the right hand fingers you could try learning the rest stroke used by classical guitar players. You should learn all about the basic chords and scales as they are played in rock music, and maybe take a look at the way folk singers play the guitar to accompany themselves singing. This will give you a basic understanding of where the bass notes are in regular guitar playing and how they fit in with the rest of the music.

Once you have a basic understanding of guitar playing you need to choose which type of bass guitar interests you most and how you are going to play it. The four string bass is tuned an octave lower than the six string guitar, with its four strings tuned to E A D G. The five and six string bass guitars can be tuned in many different ways to give a wide range of how you express yourself through your music. Now is not the time to make the decision about which bass guitar you choose, you will find out as you experiment and gain some experience playing in groups.

When you play your bass guitar you will possibly be using a plectrum. Usually this will be one of the heavier picks but they are available in a range of weights to suit the music and the player. If you choose to play the bass guitar with your fingers you will be learning a range of plucking, slapping and snapping techniques using the fingers of your right hand.

The type of bass guitar you choose to play and the technique you use to play your bass will be the methods you use to turn musical notes into bass guitar music. As the bass player you have the job of giving your group the extra thump it takes to get the dancers dancing and the audience swaying. And the great part is you do not have to be a technical virtuoso to do it. You can have fun inventing your own bass lines and making use of chords and arpeggios, but keep it simple. It is an old joke amongst rock and roll musicians that the bass player has the least technical ability, and sometimes there is an element of truth to this, but the rhythm is best expressed by simplicity.

Here is a video featuring that personification of simplicity, Flea, giving a lesson on popping and slapping.

Technorati Tags: learn to play bass guitar, four string bass, bass guitar

Theoretically any guitar player can switch from lead to bass although only one guitarist of note – Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake And Palmer – made a career out of it. It was rumored that he thought it would be a good way to stop attracting women. Actually he constantly switched between lead and bass while maintaining his position as lead singer. Clearly a guy with issues.

Anyway let us get onto the main features of a bass guitar. The standard tuning of a four string bass guitar is E A D G. The tunings are similar on the five string bass except for a low B string, and on a six string except for a high C string. So on a 6 string bass the tuning is B E A D G C. There are also seven string basses with a high F string.
There are several ways you can tune a bass guitar but as they are the same as those used to tune a regular guitar, I will not mention them. As with other guitars you tune the bass guitar by loosening the string and tuning up to the note you are aiming for. Tune each string separately being careful to match the sound of the string to your bass guitar tuner. While we are on the subject of tuning, be sure to do a search for a free online bass guitar tuner.

On the electric bass guitar, the music is made by plucking with the index and middle fingers or with a pick. Early Fender basses had a “thumbrest” attached to the pickguard, below the strings. This was to rest the fingers while the thumb plucked the strings. The common perception is that the pick is used by rock bass players but players of all styles have their own individual techniques, sometimes using thumb, fingers or pick according to the sound they want. The guitar can sound different if all upstrokes, all downstrokes or alternating strokes of the pick are employed.

Some bass players such as Les Claypool and John Entwistle played using their fingernails similar to a classical acoustic guitarist. There is controversy among musical historians over whether bass guitarists who pluck with their fingers are innovators who have explored new horizons or they simply were not told about plectrums.

Playing the bass guitar needs a certain amount of speed and dexterity, and bass guitar music will demand that you develop your own style. For inspiration listen to the most popular and influential bass players of past generations such as Paul McCartney, Pino Palladino – the replacement bass player for John Entwistle in The Who, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jaco Pastorius – called by many musicians the most innovative bass player ever, Mark King – a very fast English bass player, and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.

In the meantime, here is a music video clip from Google on how to play a C major scale on bass guitar:

Incoming search terms for the article:

• how to play bass note on a 6 string electric guitar (1)
• show me how to play go rest high on guitar (1)

Technorati Tags: how to play bass guitar, Emerson, Lake And Palmer, Les Claypool, John Entwistle, music video clip

In 1965 British rock group, The Who released a song called My Generation. Apart from its claim to fame as a rock anthem it also contains the most instantly recognizable bass guitar solo in rock and roll. This iconic solo by John Entwistle is typical of the bass solo modeled on similar solo breaks played on double bass and bass guitar in jazz music. This type of bass guitar solo is in the form of a question and answer sequence often found in blues music. The Who’s solo also imitates jazz bass solos in that it is played without other instruments behind it. In jazz such solos are played unaccompanied because other instruments tend to drown out the bass.

There have been many bass solos included in rock, funk and jazz but only in pop music has the bass guitar solo stood alone as a piece of music. The first pop musician in England to own and play an electric bass guitar was Jet Harris. He found fame and fortune with The Shadows, Cliff Richard’s backing group who were trying to make their own way in pop music as a vocal and instrumental group. Harris played on the band’s early instrumental hits featuring the lead guitar of Hank Marvin but decided to try to make it as a soloist like America’s Duane Eddy.

Jet Harris’ first big hit as a solo guitarist was in 1962 with his rendition of the 1940 song Besame Mucho. The throbbing notes of the six string bass turned a poignant love song into an instrumental work full of menace. Probably inspired by their former band member’s success, The Shadows released another six string bass solo called Stingray as a single in 1965.

These days the bass guitar is an important part of any band. It was actually born in the nineteen thirties but met with very little success until it was adopted by the early rock and roll groups of the nineteen fifties. The bass guitar is of course descended from the double bass which has always been a solo instrument in orchestral music and was often used for solo work in jazz.

If you want to play bass guitar, you might want to consider learning to play a regular guitar first. It is not absolutely necessary to become a lead or rhythm guitarist before playing bass but it seems to be the way that bass guitar players come into the world. To begin your career as a bass guitarist you can try playing through the bass tabs available on the internet. There are also some lessons available for free plus you can view heaps of bass solos and bass guitar lessons on the various video sites.

Here is a link to some free bass lessons

Once you have some practice on the bass guitar under your belt there is blinding variety of bass guitar techniques to try before you begin seriously to play solos. You can employ a wide range of plectrums or choose from the many techniques which involve plucking, popping and slapping the bass with the fingers. To some people this might sound like hard work but hopefully you will regard it as a labor of love.

Here is a video lesson on bass technique by Victor Wooten.

Incoming search terms for the article:

• blues bass soloing websites (1)
• jazz guitar solo tabs (1)

Technorati Tags: The Who, My Generation, bass guitar solo, Jet Harris, Besame Mucho