Hi, it is Paul Wolfe from how-to-play-bass.com. This is the second lesson on my virtual DVD on how to play the bass for beginners. Before we get started, I want to recommend that you head over to my website. You will find it at how-to-play-bass.com and sign up for the free monthly listing. It is totally free. Featured articles and real life bass lines for you to learn and play and other cool stuff.
Okay, in today’s lesson, we are going to look at finding our way around the fingerboard. Now most people get comfortable in the area of the fingerboard from the open strings up to say about the seventh fret. But depending on how many frets your bass has, that is only about third of the area available to you. Quick side note here, I am sure you know but if you fret a note at the 12th fret, that is the one with the double dot markings, you will find it is the same note as the open strings but an octave higher in pitch and the fingerboard just repeats from that so it makes learning much easier.
Now it is true that most bass lines situation do not go above the seventh fret area that much but it is still vital that you are still familiar with the whole of your fret board. If you check out the bass lines of John Deacon from Queen and Pino Palladino for example, they are both highly adept with the higher end of the fingerboard for their cold feels and stuff like that. Anyway, let us get started, if you are a total newbie and do not know many of the note names, you probably know the open strings right? Starting from the thickest and low in pitch, they are E, and the next open string is A and the next one is D and finally the top string is G. Now the exercise that we are going to be doing today is called the note finder. It is an easy but incredibly powerful exercise that will quickly bring you up to speed with the locations of all the different notes on your fingerboard.
The way the note finder works is like this. You take a note and then you play every instance of just that note in your bass. So if we start with the opening string, the next is found at the 12th fret. The next after that is at the seventh fret on the 8th string then you will find another E at the 19th fret on the eight string. The next one is at the second fret of the D string and the 14th fret of the string and finally you are going to find E notes at the 9th and 21st fret on the G string. So play slowly up and down through all of those, saying or thinking E while you do it, it should sound like this.
Okay, once you have done E, you go into the next note which is F and repeat the process with all the half notes so on until you have done every note, here it is with F. There is a PDF that goes with this lesson and I have included fret board diagrams for every note. So if you do not know for example where all the F sharps are, you can print out a fret board map which will tell you. If you do this exercise everyday right after you have tuned up, it will not take long until you develop a sound working knowledge of the notes of the fingerboard. Once you are really comfortable with the exercise, then you could drop it from your practice schedule, maybe review a couple of weeks and so to check if you have retained the information. This is a quick and easy method to master the fingerboard. It makes a good warm up exercise too. Now, do not forget to head over my website how-to-play-bass.com and subscribe and lookout for lesson three of the virtual DVD series where we will look at the two finger rest stroke. Email me if you have any questions and I will see you next time.
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