How to Play Bass: Basic Fingering - Intro

On of the first things that you can download from the icons of rock is my chart that shows you every finger position that you can possibly play with your hand and we are going to talk about that right now. Both the four-string and the five-string and I will demonstrate them on both.

First of all, we are beginning players the two things that I wanted you to pick up are tuner to tune your base that is very important to make sure you are always playing in tune. And the second thing is some type of metronome so that you can always play in beat. It is very important to play. You only can play as fast as you can practice slow. I know that doesn’t make sense, but if you practice slowly you will build up hand dexterity with both your right and your left hand and you will enable yourself to move along a lot quicker. Take the time to spend that time with your base and your instrument and you will be happy playing.

Now, since we are just beginning the base I am going to switch to the four-string so that we can learn how to first start getting familiar with our base. Okay, I have grabbed my four-string base and the basic positioning of your hand is very important. You want to position your left hand so that your thumb is in the middle of the neck in the back. Your thumb should always be in the middle and when playing any of the strings. Now we are going to start off by learning the names of the strings.

The first string, we are using our four-string base now so the first string is called the E string. The next string is called the A string. The next string is called the D string and the high string is called the G string or the fourth string. Now, when you look at the base it is divided into little increments and those increments are called frets. So, as we begin to learn about our base the first thing that we are going to learn even before we learn notes or anything is like I say some hand dexterity. How do we do that? If you download my favorite chart from icons of rock you can get the finger in chart that we are going to be talking about right now that builds dexterity.

This exercise—I would set my metronome to 80 beats per minute and to start off with and because we are going to go through a few things that will develop your talent. And if you set it at 80 beats per minute you should be able to play everything that we are going to talk about. The first thing we are going to talk about is how keeping your hand on the base. It is very important to keep your hand positioned on the base so that you can play all of the strings. If I keep my thumb on the back in the middle of my neck I am able to reach all of the strings with all of the fingers. So therefore we are able to play all of the notes and what you might want to do just to get familiar with your base is make sure your hand is in the middle on the back of the neck and go and touch your finger to the different places on your base.

What we are going to talk about at first is an exercise that we would do with our left hand. First we are going to do it by ourselves with out the help of the right hand. So this is just the left hand and we all know that when you put the finger pressure on the frets you will hear different notes. So the E string is divided into—we’re just going to talk about the stuff up to the 12th fret. So the E string is divided into these individual little increments called frets and what we are doing here—I just want you to take one finger press it on the first note on your base which is F and we are just going to move up the neck and touch all of the notes and try to get some type of sound out of your base.

How you amplify your sound whether it would be through a guitar, headphone when you plug in your base and you play through headphone system or you just buy a little cheap amplifier I would not advise spending a lot of money on amp until you spend a little time with your instrument because then you will better know what you want to buy. So, just buy some little cheap amp that you can use so that you can make noise.

The one thing that I wanted to make sure that you know—what you want to do is press with your finger until you can hear a sound being made for every fret. So we are going to go up here to the 12th fret (Demonstration) in the open string. So we want to do this with every finger (Demonstration) just so your hand can get use to pressing on the strings and we are going to do this on every string (Demonstration). When you are doing it with your pinky it is going to really hurt. So you get used to hurt a little bit when learning how to play the base because your hand will hurt. So we want to do that as basic finger.


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