Whatever your reasons, you want to learn how to play bass. You don’t have to go to music school to do this. You can take online bass guitar lessons. You don’t even need a bass guitar to start out with. Any acoustic guitar will do, since the top four strings of any guitar are the four strings of a bass guitar. What you learn on an acoustic guitar you can then transfer to bass.
Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.
It can be played by plucking, slapping, tapping, popping, or by picking the strings with a pick. The bass guitar looks somewhat similar to an electric guitar, but with a larger, heavier body, a longer scale length, and a longer neck. The bass guitar usually has four strings, tuned one octave lower in pitch than the four lower strings of a guitar.
Advanced players must have some command of scale, chord and arpeggio patterns, to be advanced, yet often they get real fast and efficient with enough patterns to impress others and get by, but they realize how extremely limited they still are, and how they are not really as advanced as they would like to be because of their insufficient scope and grasp of a complete mastery of the fretboard with the current patterns that they already know, as well as the theoretical aspect behind the patterns and their use.
Besides, this will give you a chance to expand your instrument sound range, giving it more depth and compression. There are different variations of slapping the string. Slap bass techniques are commonly found in all types of music, but most notably in the funk, Latin and pop styles.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be harder than it looks. Here’s why: The muscles that move your hands and fingers across the neck and strings are rarely used for other tasks. The fine motor skills needed to play a stringed instrument require that the small muscles of the hands be strengthened. So when you take up the bass, you’re like a baby learning to walk: Not only do you have no idea of what you’re doing, you don’t even have the muscles to do it.
Use your left thumb as a pivot, keeping your elbow out from your body so that it can swing back and forth freely. Curve the fingers of your left hand out over the neck to reach notes on the thicker strings; as your thumb pivots. Play the notes on the thinner strings with your fingers flattened more against the neck, your elbow pulled back, and your left thumb standing almost out straight from the neck.
So, now that you have the basic steps on hand position for playing your bass guitar. Now, what you’ve got to do is learn some other basic stuff, like scales, techniques and song. Be sure that you actually WANT to learn and don’t let the frustration discourage you!
