Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Online Bass Lessons: Techniques, Tips And Grooves in Just One Pack

By John Barton

Maybe you're a fan of Flea of the Chili Peppers, or Sting, or Paul McCartney. Bass can be almost as prestigious as drums, the bass is more important to a bands sound than the drums are. Drums set the tempo, but bass truly sets the groove of the song. It's both rhythmic and melodic.

Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.

Whatever your reasons, you want to learn how to play bass. You don't have to go to music school to do this. You can take online bass guitar lessons. You don't even need a bass guitar to start out with. Any acoustic guitar will do, since the top four strings of any guitar are the four strings of a bass guitar. What you learn on an acoustic guitar you can then transfer to bass.

Bass players want to be able to play the type of leads, licks and arpeggio runs that the pro players are doing, yes since most bass players have a really poor knowledge of their fretboard patterns and their application of them is so limited that it becomes a set back to their ability to play more and do more with their instrument. Not only do they need to know the right pattern to use and how to execute them in many different ways, but they also need to know how to practice with them. Regular practice with the proper set of fretboard patterns is a necessary component of becoming a seasoned player, time must be spent with practice, but it is important to know how to practice so that hours a day are not spent with insufficient result.

Learning how to play slap bass and incorporating slap techniques into your bass playing will not only make you a better bass player, but also a more versatile one. To learn slap bass is not as hard as some people may think. You just have to keep with it and you will get it.

It is clearly not enough to know how to play your favorite instrument; you should always be looking to find new techniques and ways of playing. Learn blues bass guitar and rock the house. You may prefer a particular style of music over many others and when you begin learning a new instrument but perhaps over time, you will develop a fondness for other styles or genres.

Also, crucial to slap bass is the "snapping" sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard - this is called "popping". Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics - but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.

A bass guitarist/bassist is like the anchor of a band. He/she outlines the harmony of the music being performed, while simultaneously indicating the rhythmic pulse of it. The bass guitarist is like the lifeblood of any band, and the bass guitar is his/her tool of choice, used to mesmerize audiences. A bass guitar is a bass stringed instrument that is played with the fingers.

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