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this thread will document my approach to learning bass guitar. enough deliberate, conscious practice, and any skill can become automatic, eventually. something like bass guitar is most easily broken up into a set of sub-skills: [hitting the right frets, plucking, muting, ... , etc]. many of these sub-skills can be broken up into sub-sub-skills: hitting the right frets includes: [scales, muscle memory, ... , etc.] and then again: scales and muscle memory are their own complex little topics. my start is this: a roommate is like, always, playing acoustic guitar. he's playing right now. there was an acoustic bass lying around and i began grabbing it to join in. i step up with a resume that has bullet-points like "i know what an autechre is" and so, clearly, i just listen to what he's doing and add abstract rhythmic plonks and twanks. these are met with fairly decent reception... but, i get bored of it. i fumble around for the root note and begin attempting to actually play along. this is intolerable to roommate, because most of the notes are wrong. i know they are wrong, and this is intolerable to me also. so he teaches me a-minor. then a-major. at 2am we get into a deep discussion about how the real thing here is to grow a mental grid around the frets of the bass guitar -- re-usable patterns that map in infinite loops -- and at that point, you can do anything. the grid i've been growing has the first strings down pretty well, now. i still have some trouble shifting the scale patterns to keys low-down on the frets -- you know, the point where the grid begins to wrap around the other end. doing this while listening to someone else play is much more complicated and i don't have enough space left in this post so now i'm going to go back to work. my real job, not bass |
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Great :) |
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I think that’s how Chris Squire and Charles Mingus (amongst many greats) saw it too. |
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my strange beweaseled resume also includes: , , , four years of robot dancing, and a couple years of fussing around with a bass guitar i eventually got bored of and sold before i had any of the other stuff i just listed. so, essentially, this is my second try, and i am like, nine million times better prepared for it. approximately. it is all soaking in extremely fast, but there's no rushing some things -- my finger strength/callousness just needs regular practice. same with typing, it's a feeling of "stupid fingers! do what i told you to do!" yes, this is much better. there is a lot going on. press the right fret in the right spot -- hard -- and pluck the string. then mute the string. repeat. juggling which finger needs to be where is something i don't have much to say on at the moment, except that now i'm starting to be able to feel comfortable with three fingers instead of just one and a half. on top of this there is the scale, the key, and doing all of this in a regular sort of coherent rhythm. trying to do that while listening to someone else play is much more complicated and i don't have enough space left in this post so i'm going to just melt into the ceiling. |
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i took like four semesters of music theory in college, and most of it has drifted off. oodles of voice leading homework exercise. i'm sure a bunch of it crept into the way i write music, but in a practical/deliberate sense, i generally have only used it when i've painted myself into a corner -- twelve layers of synths on the computer, what notes do i want? i'll sit there and work it out. usually i don't need to; i can just fuss around and find what i want and it's faster than working it out on paper. playing bass guitar along with one or two other people playing acoustic, though -- i find myself reaching back for this stuff. the bassist is supposed to take the chords happening and walk along the bottom of it. my ear works decently enough; i'll walk up and down scales and a natural sense of timing will land me on the right notes at the right times... but there's a growing awareness of the structure of what i'm doing. like... that worked, and there's a reason why, and if i sit and think on it i can often figure it out. it is starkly reminiscent of where i was in like 2007. i was programming these complex tapestries of midi on piano rolls and it was massively overbuilt and i was sick of it, and i started to get into hardware. i was terrible at it at first -- having to do stuff live when i was used to programming everything -- but i felt like it was good for me. it forced me to get good at rhythm. but i was still mostly programming the harmonies in advance, even if i was playing them live. predetermined patterns. getting my fingers in the right place at the right time... pretty much, suffering through being terrible at bass will make me a stronger musician, just like ditching plugins for the old-skool 80s hardware approach did. |
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