Hi, it is Paul Wolfe from how-to-play-bass.com. This is the first lesson in 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 web site how-to-play-bass.com and sign up for the free monthly easy. It is totally free and features obstacles, real life bass lines, future learn and plays, reviews and other cool stuffs. It is well worth checking out.
Today’s lesson is going to cover tuning the bass. We are going to look at the three ways of tuning the bass and then how to combine them so that, we can use the daily activity of tuning the bass as a new training exercise.
The first and easiest way to tune your bass is to use an electronic tune-up, mine looks like this. Electronic tune is cheap. They are about ten pounds or so, quick and accurate. Basically, all you do is plug your bass into the tune-up and play the strings one by one. The tuner will let you know whether you need to tune down or up to be in tune.
Now, though electronic tune is so great and over reliance on them can leave you exposed in situations where you need to tune either slightly flat or slightly sharp. If you are ever playing in a church band for example or a venue where they have an El Sitio piano then you got to tune to the piano.
In these situations, it is common to find the piano that is in tune with itself but in the sharper or flatter than the absolute pitch supplied by digital bass tuner. Here you find yourself in these situations, you need now turning on how to tune your bass without digital tune-up but you need to be able to do it confidently, competently and quickly.
The second method of tuning your bass is also called the open string method without going into a lot of distracting info or theory, the open string method relies on the fact that your bass is tune in perfect folds. What this means is in real terms is that if you play your G-string and then fret the notes at the fifth fret on the string below that which is the D string, these two notes should be the same if your bass is in tune. It should sound like this.
Now, I am going to put my D string out of tune and play that again so you can hear the difference. Now, you hear the two notes are not the same. You hear that difference in pitch between the two strings as an oscillation, the faster that oscillation is going, the more out of tune the two strings are. As you tune the D string to the open G, the oscillation slows right down until you cannot hear it anymore, like this. Now, we are in tune.
Now, the D string is tuned to the G string. Once you have done that, you can repeat the process with the A string, play the open D string and then play the A string at fifth fret which is also a D. Listen out for that oscillation which indicates the strings were out of tune and tune the A string to the D string. Once, you have tune the A string, you repeat the process with D string, sound the open A string then fret the A string at the fifth fret and tune the E string to the A string.
Okay, we have looked to tuning your bass with the digital tuner and the open string method. Now, we are going to look at the third method and this is by using the natural harmonics of the bass. I am not going to get into harmonic theory here. Basically, a harmonic is an overturn and you produce it by putting your fretting hand onto the string at certain points of the bass finger board which you call notes and you do not push your finger down to the finger board and then you play a normal stroke. Here is what it should sound like.
With relevance to tuning your bass, if you sound the harmonic at the seventh fret on the G string and harmonic on the fifth fret of the D string, they should sound the same as the D string is in tune with the G string should sound like this.
Again, listen up for the oscillation if the strings are out of tune. As you turn in your tuning picks, if the oscillation gets slower you are heading the wrong way. If it gets faster, you are de-tuning so you should stop and tune the other way. This relationship works on the other strings, to
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