4 things you HAVE to practice when you pick up the BASS

[Music] hi my name is Denise I'm Abby's t-shirt listen face and I am here to tell you four things and you have to practice when you pick up a bit okay so congratulations you made the right choice of picking up the instrument that will make you the coolest person in the band but you picked it up it's four strings - Leslie guitar but still something is not working you're not sure what to do with it well that's why I'm here so I'm gonna give you four points to consider practicing when you just picked up a bass and you want to try to get better and play with other people so the first thing that you have to practice is very very important that's gonna be the really the element that separates you from being an amateur to a good bass player and this element is clean sound okay so a lot of the students I get the first problem that we encounter is that when they play a string they have other strings ringing at the same time okay so most of this actually comes from the right hand so you have to have good control in the right hand so every time that you play you want to really give it a full attention and then another thing that could help it is that you can sometimes use the left hand to mute it but as you can see sometimes you have the harmonics okay so it's kind of a combination between the right hand control and the left hand control that you need to practice now how do we practice clean sound when you play a bassline the best thing that you can do is record yourself now it doesn't have to be a DI W it could be they'll be great but it could also just be your phone record yourself and then listen to yourself after and see how it sounds so that all of your focus will be okay how do I sound and not just how do I play and then how do I sound okay very important when you practice this it's kind of essential that you won't go into the too busy bass lines that you may like try to pick something simple that you can work have your time really focused on you can have your articulation really focused on and you can actually see if the sound is clean now if you can't have two notes in the baseline clean then I can guarantee that you can't have anything that is a little bit more complicated than that so for this occasion I created a little simple baseline for you to practice so you can see if your sound is clean or not and actually compared so you can have a few takes of playing it and then you'll see for when you practice it even though you're just working on clean sound it's very important that you use the metronome the metronome as I always say is your best friend it's not gonna lie to you when you're not on time and you're not playing well okay so make sure that you work with the met room so you can have clean sound and work on the second element that we're gonna talk about but first of all let's try this exercise that I made for you one two three four one okay so now that we play this you have a little exercise to work with and to make sure that your sound is clean now sound is clean meaning that there's no other strings ringing whether you play if you want to know more about how to meet your strings properly press this link over here and I'll explain to you so work on the clean sound and as you can already see we're working with the metronome which brings me to the second thing that you have to practice which is time okay so the bass guitar is really the spine of any rhythm section because we're like the the people who help the guitar and the keyboard communicate with the drums we have a lot of rhythm aspect and elements in the plane but we also have our ways to show the harmony progression right so lucky for you this exercise can also really really help you practice time now you may think your time is very stable but first of all if you haven't worked with the metronome you may discover that you're wrong and second of all I'm just gonna repeat that please practice simple in the beginning so that you have control okay you have to have a base and then go into the more complicated things later on we want to make sure that everything sounds good so you can jam with your friends very soon third thing that you have to practice when you pick up a bass is put theory to work okay so what do I mean by that it's basically know what to play and win it's very important there's a lot of people to kind of wing it but you know how good is something when you wing it and opposed to when you really know what you want to do okay so spend a little time and then get to to know which chords you should play or for example if you've come from guitar and you know that the guitar player is playing G and you are playing the root note that's awesome but after the root note there's a whole world that you can play you know you can play a whole chord you can play a triad you can play different scales and I know that a lot of people really rely on their ear but there's something very focusing about knowing what you're going to play you know it's kind of like think about it when you're cooking okay you're cooking in the kitchen you haven't really learned how to cook and you're just putting different spices sometimes you look out and you have an awesome tasting dish a lot of times you've actually dentally put cinnamon and chicken soup and well that didn't work quite well right so it's the same thing we're knowing what notes to put where and when you actually have a grasp of even just minimum Theory knowledge it would really help you to know which notes to play when you're jamming with your guitar player friend okay the fourth thing that you have to practice when you pick up a bass actually it doesn't have to do with the bass being in your hands okay the fourth thing is every time that you listen to music isolate the baseline listen only to the baseline and see what it does okay now this doesn't have to be music that is based on bass the bass is the star of the music it could be any sort of music could be funk it could be country it could be pop it could be metal it could be anything but listen only to the base and just take mental notes of what is happening okay so you may see a different elements such as consistency you know like that the bassline repeats and it repeats the same way and it's being played the same way and is repeating the same pattern or you may find something like different styles of playing so maybe somebody play's fingerstyle then suddenly pops into slap or you may see you may find different sounds so you may see that some know some songs have the pic in them have a bass player playing with pic some don't have it and maybe some songs that you really really love and really move you only have whole notes you know and this is the beauty of bass that we can play very complicated and very kind of like virtuoso and then sometimes we could just stand in the back and it's very important to know when to do what okay cuz it's our job as bass players okay so this was the four things that you have to practice when you pick up a bass again congrads this is the best instrument in the world so you've done the right thing I hope that I gave you some elements to work on already this is obviously just a very short preview of what you can practice on the bass don't let the mere four strings fool you there's a lot to do it is a very fun instrument to play and if you have any questions feel free to post in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer them otherwise feel free to book a lesson with me unless the face and learn a little bit more about this instrument and how to work with the bass and play with other people I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope that it helped you and

Channel: Lessonface

Views: 1,232,155

Rating: 4.8748994 out of 5

Keywords: lessonface, online lessons, online music lessons, learn music online, online classes, lessonface bass, lessonface steve stine, lessonface guitar, learn music, yonit spiegelman, bass guitar, beginner bass, bass lesson, tips for beginner bass, bass guitar easy tips, learn how to play the bass, tip for bass guitar

Id: lRKfjM8M_1o

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019