Sunday, July 12, 2009

Online Bass Lessons: Learn Without Adquiring Bad Practice Habits

By Marshal Washington

Maybe you're a fan of Flea of the Chili Peppers, or Sting, or Paul McCartney. Bass can be almost as prestigious as drums, the bass is more important to a bands sound than the drums are. Drums set the tempo, but bass truly sets the groove of the song. It's both rhythmic and melodic.

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.

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.

The standard tuning of a four string bass guitar from highest (thinnest string) to lowest (fattest string) is G-D-A-E. On a five string bass the tunings are similar with the addition of a low B string. On a six string bass guitar, a thinner (higher pitched) string is added, and is tuned to C, In other words on a 6 string bass guitar the settings are B-E-A-D-G-C, where B is the fattest string or lowest note and C the highest and thinnest.

Learning how to play slap bass and incorporating slap techniques into your bass playing will not only make you a better bass player, but also a more versatile one. To learn slap bass is not as hard as some people may think. You just have to keep with it and you will get it.

When you hear the term learn slap bass, what it refers to is learning how to play certain techniques on the bass guitar. No matter what the other instruments in a band sound like, the bass guitar is crucial and is really the glue that holds the whole thing together. Slap bass is a way of playing the bass guitar.

Also, crucial to slap bass is the "snapping" sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard - this is called "popping". Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics - but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.

A bass guitarist/bassist is like the anchor of a band. He/she outlines the harmony of the music being performed, while simultaneously indicating the rhythmic pulse of it. The bass guitarist is like the lifeblood of any band, and the bass guitar is his/her tool of choice, used to mesmerize audiences. A bass guitar is a bass stringed instrument that is played with the fingers.

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