How to Play Bass for Beginners - Lesson 11
Hi, it’s Paul Wolf from how-to-play-bass.com. This is the eleventh lesson of my virtual DVD on how to play the bass for beginners. Now before we get started I want to recommend that you head over to my website at how-to-play-bass.com, don’t forget the hyphens and sign up for the escene. Totally free, pictures arts called, real life bass lines for you to learn and play and other cool stuff. Okay, in today’s lesson, we’ll gonna summarize what we’ve look at so far and where we go from here. So, we started out with the basics, tuning your bass in lesson one. Then we looked to finding your way around the finger board. That was lesson two. Then in the third lesson, we looked to the two finger vest stroke, and finally in the fourth lesson, we looked at the left hand technique. Then we put that all together, and we look at how to play the bass lines for five different tunes. Now, if you’ve come this far, the question you’re probably asking is where do I go from here? Now, it’s a good question, and there’s no clear answer, coz the answer will be different for different people. What I would like to say is this, whatever time that you can spend now, sitting down, working out your goals and working out a plan to achieve that by implementing the system, that would be time that is repaid to you a hundred times over, and will give you a clear advantage over 95 percent and more of your friends and rivals. Now, the scuds of info on the website about goal setting and how it relates to practice schedule, is also gonna be covered on more detail in my ebook on practicing that I’m currently writing. The release date for that is scheduled as March 2009. If you’re a member of my list, which you can subscribe to via the website, you get an email about that near the time. Okay, in general there are two things that you can do to make progress as a bass player. One is to learn and assimilate new material. And the second is to identify any flaws or faults, and then make sure you correct them. Now, identifying flaws maybe difficult for most beginners, this is where having private lessons with a good teacher can help, but the best method of doing it yourself without fail is to video yourself playing. Doesn’t have to be flashy and fancy, simple webcam will do the job, I’ll be looking at some common faults on the final lessons, so make sure you check those out. And just so you know, in filming this series of lessons, I’ve picked up a couple of minor faults on my own technique which I wasn’t really aware of and which I now have to work on to fix. Now, in terms of progressing by assimilating new materials, and don’t be put off, assimilating is just a smart ass word for learning, it’s critical you don’t make the mistake of just picking tunes to learn, and assume you’re getting better although when you first starting out, if you’re learning tunes you probably are getting better. But what you wanna really do is work on a series of tunes that get progressively more complex. That way, each new tune that you learn extends your comfort zone just a little further, and that by default will make you a better player, now, there’s a couple of graded list of songs on the website, look for the fifty songs button on the left hand side, and that will give you an idea of what I’m talking about. Also please note that I don’t think it’s wrong to learn a tune that you like for fun, or a tune that you want to play with your mates in the jam sessions or something like that. After all that’s why we all started out when we all picked up a bass for the first time, but don’t confuse that with making progress and with the progression of your abilities if that tune is actually easy and it’s not taking you out of your comfort zone. Anyway, look out for the final lesson where I look at some common mistakes, email me if you got any questions, I’ll see you next time.