Hi, it is Paul Wolfe from howtoplayabase.com. This is the fifth lesson of my virtual DVD on how to play the base for beginners. Now, before we get started, I want to recommend that you head over to my web site at howtoplayabase.com and sign up for the free monthly leasing. It is totally free and features articles, real life baselines, future learn and play, lot of article stuff.
In today’s lesson, we are going to put together the techniques we looked at in the earlier lessons where the notes are located on the finger board, left hand technique, right hand technique and we are going to put them all together in the context of learning a tune. Now, I have picked every breath you take by the police as our first tune for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is an easy baseline; secondly, it is one of Sting’s best songs, so it is a really cool tune to learn. Also, the baseline as we are going to be playing it, it is pretty much straight face notes all the way through so you can concentrate on playing the notes and not have to worry about dealing with anything other than a very straight forward rhythm make approach. Now, there is a PDF on my web site, howtoplayabase.com, you surf to the songs page and you will find it there, that gives you loads of additional details on how you should be playing this tune. Okay, the first part of the song is the verse, just made up of two eight bar sections; I will play the first one first and then break it down.
Nothing to complicate you there. Firstly, the rhythm all the way through that we are going to play is straight eight notes, so we are just going to play eight notes for each bar. The first two bars are easy, all the notes are A. Then you could play the open A string but I prefer to play the A at the fifth fret of the E string. Remember to alternate your index and middle fingers as you play. Now, you note some fret in the A note here at the fifth fret of the E string with my little finger, this is so when we move down to the next note which is the F sharp here at the second fret of the E string, we can fret that with the first finger and we do not have to move our hand. Economy of motion is a great principle to start learning now, it will really pay of down the line when you are learning complex tunes but it will not hurt you to start acquiring good habits now. Now, the F sharp last for two bars so you play that note 16 times like this.
After that, we shift to the D which we play it the fifth fret of the A string and again we finger that with that with the fore finger, that is only for a bar there so you play that eight times like this. And you move up from the D to E which we play it the second fret of the D string, this is also for a bar, so again, you play it eight times. And then finally, for the last two bars of this first eight bar section, we return home to the A note at the fifth fret of the A string for two bars. That is the first section, it is fairly straight forward. Work on this with the match or a drum machine pattern until you have got it down, work on making your eight notes even in consistent, watch out for the string skip when you move from the inert on the D string back down to the A.
The second part of the song we are going to look at is the second half of the verse. Let us play it through first.
That should sound similar to the first section of the tune. It is identical except for he last two bars. Instead of returning from the E down to A on the E string, you move up to F sharp, which is played at the four fret of the D string. I use the third finger her to hold that down and it plays there for two bars so you repeat the notes 16 times. If you refer to the PDF lesson and you listen to the police version repeatedly, you find that you will know instinctively which form to use, whether to go down to the A for the last two bars of an eight bar section, or whether to move up to the F sharp.
The next part of the song we are going to look at is the chorus. This is an eight bar section, sounds like this.
Okay, it is pretty straight forward. The first part is the D note played
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