BASS GUITAR LESSONS

Hello and welcome to our bass guitar instruction. If you are here, you must be one of the
millions of individuals who would love to learn how to play the bass guitar or enhance your
playing ability more than it already is. If this sounds like you, then this is the right place to
begin. It must be understood right from the start that learning to play the bass guitar is an
ongoing process and one which does not happen overnight. Do not be discouraged by this
because, we are offering the best lessons to get you going through the learning process to
playing some jamming tunes on the bass guitar. These next 30 lessons are complete and
ready for you to begin. As a bonus, there are an additional ten lessons to take you a step
further in being the best bass player you can be with more techniques and information.

Working with us will be like having a private tutor showing you every step you need to take
in order to become the best. You will find that learning to play the bass guitar is better
when you can take the time to learn at your own pace. Each lesson is designed to take you
step by step until you have mastered the lesson and are ready to move on to the next.
Each expert lesson will break down the specifics and give you the ability to learn at your
own speed and at your own skill level. The first few lessons will consist of the basics of the
bass guitar and familiarizing yourself with it. You can't play something you do not know.
Once you are familiar with how your bass guitar works, the remaining 27 lessons will be
devoted to showing you how to play and become the best at this amazing instrument. With
some practice you will be able to master the bass guitar in no time and be jamming out
with your friends to some good music.

Lesson 01 - Bass Guitar Anatomy

Lesson 02 - Holding the Bass and Tuning, Plucking, String Names
Lesson 03 - Reading Bass Notes
Lesson 04 - Rest, Music Symbols and Tablature
Lesson 05 - The 12 Major Scales
Lesson 06 - Practice
Lesson 07 - Finger Strength
Lesson 08 - Sharps, Flats and Keys
Lesson 09 - The 12 Minor Scales
Lesson 10 - Beginner Rhythms
Lesson 11 - Being Under-rated and the Foundation
Lesson 12 - Following Chord Progression
Lesson 13 - Respect
Lesson 14 - Muting
Lesson 15 - Right Hand Technique
Lesson 16 - Slap Bass Technique
Lesson 17 - Octaves
Lesson 18 - Pentatonic and the Blues Scale
Lesson 19 - Odd Meter
Lesson 20 - Major Chords and Arpeggios
Lesson 21 - Minor Chords and Arpeggios
Lesson 22 - Playing Over Chords
Lesson 23 - Playing Together
Lesson 24 - Ohms, Watts?
Lesson 25 - Bass Blues
Lesson 26 - Bass Solo
Lesson 27 - Quality Over Quantity
Lesson 28 - Modes
Lesson 29 - Using Modes
Lesson 30 - Harmonics

BASIC BASS GUITAR LESSONS

Bass Chromatics Lesson
Alternate Tuning
History of the Bass Guitar
Bass Practicing Tips
Bilingual Musicians
Choosing the Right Bass Guitar
Muting or Playing Clean
Right Hand Technique
Slap that Bass
Walking Bass Lines

Bass Lesson 01 - Bass Guitar Anatomy

To many guitar enthusiasts, guitar anatomy is something we do not think of as important
when learning the basics. As far as music theory is concerned, you will not need to know
the instrument parts. However, in order to fully understand some of the following lessons
and articles, you will need to know the parts of a guitar and where they are located on
your guitar in particular.
 Starting from the top
of the guitar is the
headstock. The
headstock contains
the tuning pegs, the
nut, and usually the
logo of your guitar.
The headstock is
made of the same
material as the neck
since most of the time
they are the same
piece.

The machine heads,

or tuning pegs are
contained by the
headstock. The tuning
pegs are a very
important part of your
guitar and every
guitar has them. The
tuning pegs hold the
strings at a certain
tension and can be
turned clockwise or
counterclockwise to change the pitch of each individual string. Depending on how your
guitar is strung, turning the peg clockwise could make the pitch of the respective string go
up or down.

The next item down is the truss rod cover. Often overlooked because of it is not
frequently used, the truss rod cover hides the end of the truss rod in your guitar neck.

The truss rod is usually metal or graphite but could be any strong material. Since your
strings are wound very tightly they produce a great deal of tension, which is put on the
neck. You can think of the guitar as a bow and arrow if that illustration helps. The truss
rod is a rod that is inside of your guitar neck in order to take stress off of the neck. Truss
rods are used in all steel or high tension instruments, like electric basses. They can be
tightened or loosened to raise or lower the distance between your strings and frets.

The nut is what the strings are resting on before they go through the machine heads. The
nut helps set the length of the open strings, along with the bridge saddles. It also provides
a smooth path for the strings to go into the machine heads so they do not get caught on
anything or severely bent. Finally, the nut sets the distance between strings at the lower
frets.

The fretboard and frets are used together to change the vibrating length of the string.
The frets, which can vary in size, are pushed into the fretboard and are made of metal,
specifically steel. Both the fretboard and the frets are glued to the guitar neck.

The neck is connected to the guitar’s body and contains the frets and the fretboard. The
neck can be bolted or glued to the guitar’s body, or it can be one piece with the guitar’s
body.

The body of the guitar is what holds the electronics, pickups, and bridge. It may be made
of various types of solid wood, or it may be hollow or semi-hollow.
The pickups are made of 43-
guage wire and magnets. The
magnets are wrapped with the
wire and “pick up” the
frequency of the vibrating
strings, converting the frequency
into a signal that can be read by
amplifiers and other guitar gear.

The bridge of the guitar holds

the strings for the tuning pegs.
The bridge also sets the
intonation of the instrument, the
string height, and the distance
between strings. Bridges come in
many different styles. Bass
guitars do not usually have a
whammy bar, but it is not
unheard of.

The knobs on a guitar control

the volume and tone of your
guitar. There are many different
arrangements of knobs. Some
guitars have a volume and tone
control for each pickup, whereas some have two tones and one volume. Some basses may
even have a 3-band equalizer onboard!

Bass guitars also have an output jack. Like any other electric instrument, the output jack
is where you plug your cable into your guitar, while the other end goes into your amplifier.

Bass Lesson 02 - Holding the Bass and Tuning, Plucking, String Names
After you successfully know and understand the parts of your guitar, you can continue on to
holding your bass properly, tuning it up, and plucking a bit. That is exactly what this article
will be covering.

So, you have your new or used bass: first things first – if it is in a package, take it out! Be
careful not to scratch or drop it. If you have an amplifier, you will need to plug your bass
into it. Your bass will have an output jack on it, somewhere near the knobs and bridge,
maybe even on the side of your guitar. You will need a ¼ inch cable to plug your guitar into
your amp, which your salesman should have provided for you. Now, turn on your amplifier
and crank up the volume on your guitar and amp. You can play around with the other knobs
to get a sound that you like, but for the most part any tone will be sufficient.

Now that you are hooked up and have some sound coming out of your amp, you are ready
to embrace your guitar and tune it up. To hold your guitar on your leg, simply put the
curved part of the guitar’s body on your right leg (if you are right handed) or on the left (if
you are left handed). The knobs should be closest to the ground. If you are using a strap,
you will wear it so that the strap goes under your right arm, over your left arm, and behind
your neck. Depending on what bass you have purchased, the headstock may fall to the
ground if you take your hands off, but most basses are built so that if you are not holding
them, they will stay somewhat level with the ground. Now, on to the strings!

Each string, when plucked at an open position (meaning you are not adjusting the note by
fretting), will play a different note. Whatever notes your strings play when they are
plucked open is the tuning you will use. The picture shows a 5 string bass with the number
of the string and the note labeling each string. If you have a 4 string bass, you will only
have strings 1-4. The standard four string bass is tuned to E A D G, with E being the biggest
string, closest to your chin (or B if you have a 5th string).
So, in order to tune your strings, you will have to turn the tuning pegs accordingly. One
direction will make the string pitch go up, and the other direction will obviously go down.
Which direction does what? It depends on who last strung your guitar; just pluck the string
with your finger and turn the peg a quarter turn either direction to determine whether it
goes up or down in pitch.

With that in mind, pick up an electric tuner. Using an electric tuner is highly recommend
for your first month or two, at least until you can tell note from note with ease. Otherwise
tuning will be very frustrating for you and may discourage your practice habits. There are
two modes on electric tuners, manual and automatic. Manual mode will tell you which note
you are closest to. Automatic mode lets you select which string you are tuning. Most tuners
have a button to push so that you can select which string you are tuning; after you make
your selection, you will then pluck the respective string on your guitar. Plugging your guitar
directly into the tuner will significantly help with both accuracy and ease of use. After you
pluck the note, the tuner will say that you are either sharp or flat. Sharp is shown as # and
flat is shown as a lower case “b.”
Flat means you are below the correct pitch, while sharp is just the opposite. If your E string
is flat or sharp, you will need to turn your tuning peg until it is at the correct pitch. Most
tuners have a gauge that is easily read. You will need to tune each string individually and
make sure that you are turning the correct tuning peg and plucking the correct string –
otherwise bad things could happen! Once you have all of these concepts down, check out
Lesson 3!

Bass Lesson 03 - Reading Bass Notes

To get into playing as quickly as possible, you must first learn how to read music. Without
written music, musicians would not be able to remember all of their songs for long periods
of time. They would also not be able to share their music as easily with other people. So,
this article looks at what music encompasses.

At its most basic level, music is a series of symbols and lines that, when read correctly,
tells a musician what notes to play and how to play them, allowing anyone to reproduce a
musical tune. So, the first things you need to cover are clefs and time signatures.

As a bassist, you will use the bass clef; this means that all of the notes on your bass music
will be bass notes found on the bass clef. Music for a traditional guitar is in treble clef.
The bass clef looks like a backwards “C” with a colon “:” on the right side. The treble clef
looks like a really fancy “G”. There are other clefs, but this article focuses on the bass
clef. The bass clef is also called the “F” clef and assigns where the note “F” is located on
the 5 lines. Now, there is only one type of bass clef used where the “F” note is located on
the second to the top line. You are probably wondering where the note “F” is actually
located.

This note is an F note. Any note that lies on this line is also an F. Because this line is
between the two dots on the bass clef symbol, this is the line that will contain notes in the
pitch of F. The lines of bass clef music will contain the notes G B D F A from the lowest
line to the top. The spaces from bottom to top will contain the notes A C E G B. Tip:
Treble clef music has different notes for each line, so make sure you are reading the right
kind of music. If you start from the lowest space and go to the highest line, then notes will
be as follows: A B C D E F G A, the notes that make up the A minor scale. Now you already
know your first scale – A minor! It is imperative that in your practice habits you learn
where each note is, and you are able to name it on the spot without delay. This will help
you immensely when you are sight- reading music, or playing it for the first time.

Now that you know pitches, you can cover note lengths as well. Music is important in that
it tells what pitches to play, but even more important in bass music, it tells how long to
play each note and when not to play. The lengths or notes, together with the tempo (or
speed) of the song make up its rhythm.

The first things you need to know are the time signature and the tempo. The tempo sets
the speed of the music. Tempo is measured in beats per minute and is exactly that – how
many beats per minute there are. The tempo will be displayed at the top of the page with
a quarter note equaling some number above 0 and usually below 60.

The time signature tells how many beats are in each measure of music. A measure of
music is defined by thin vertical bars on the sheet music. Between each pair of vertical
lines is a measure. The first note of each measure is slightly accented or weighted to help
mark chord progressions and repeated rhythmic patterns. In order to find out what time
signature you should be playing in, look at the first measure. Just before the first
measure, there should be a fraction. Most often it will say 4/4 or have a “C” for common
time, which is the same as 4/4. Now, the bottom note tells us what note gets th measure
and the top number says how many of those notes are in the measure. So, 4/4 means that
there are 4 notes in each measure, and that you can fit in four quarter notes. If the music
were in 3/8 there would be 3 eighth notes in every measure (or the equivalent). Now, we
can talk notes.
To keep things simple for the first few lessons, assume that you are in 4/4 time.

A whole note gets 4 beats; since the quarter note is the beat, a whole note will have 4
quarter notes. Measure 1 contains one whole note.

A half note gets two beats, so each whole note is equivalent to two quarter notes. Measure
2 contains 2 half notes.

A quarter note in 4/4 time gets one beat. Measure 3 has 4 quarter notes.

Measure 4 is made up of 8 eighth notes. Eighth notes are half as long as quarter notes;
because of this they are played twice as fast.

Measure 5 is 16 sixteenth notes. Each note gets ¼ of a beat and is played twice as fast as
an eighth note. There are 4 per beat, or per quarter note.

If you notice, the total value of all the notes in one measure is always 4. This has to be
true for the music to be played if you are in 4/4 time. If you have two quarters and a half
note in a measure, it is fine, but three half notes in one measure are not ok unless you
change the time signature, which will be covered in a future lesson. This concludes the
lesson about notation notes and fundamental rhythms. Later articles will talk about mixing
up the eighth notes and quarter notes and starting to groove. When you feel you have
perfected everything in this lesson, then move on to the next!

Bass Lesson 04 - Rest, Music Symbols and Tablature

After learning the basic notes and note lengths of music, we need to learn about rests and
all the other symbols we will find in music. So, in order for us to get the best idea of these
examples, we will use the following sample piece of music. This example was not created
to sound remarkable but to include most of the common musical symbols.

At first you may notice the items you have already covered in the past lesson. These items
include the time signature, bass clef, and tempo. You will notice each measure is
numbered; these numbers are called measure numbers. In the first measure there is a 4
beat rest, or a whole rest. This means you will not play anything in this measure.
Measure 2 contains, in this order, a half rest for 2 beats, a quarter rest for one beat, an
eighth rest for ½ of a beat, and two sixteenth rests, both for ¼ of a beat. If you add the
respective values for each rest, you will get 4, which means you do not play for 4 beats (or
the whole measure). In music, you will not see rests arranged in this manner; instead, you
will see just another whole rest, but they have been included this way in the example so
that you can see what each looks like.

Measure 3 has a few odd symbols. The first beat is a quarter note with a dot next to it.
This dot means to add half of that note to the total value. Since half of a quarter note is
an eighth note, you add the value of the eighth note to that quarter note, so the total
value would be three eighth notes, or one quarter note and one eighth note. You will
notice that the dotted quarter note has a curved line connecting it to the next note. This
symbol, referred to as a tie, means that you will add the values of both notes together and
play them as one note without stopping. A dotted quarter tied to an eighth note has the
same length as a half note.

After the tie, there is a cluster of three notes grouped with a “3.” This means that
regardless of what value an eighth note takes, you are going to play 3 eighth notes in this
beat. These notes are called triplets and are a great way to grab the audience’s attention.
The second note of our triplet has a small dot above the note; this does not mean to add
half of the original note’s value. Instead, it means to play it “short and detached,” or
staccato. This means the note will have space around it to make the note sound shorter
than it really is. Audio clip of staccato playing.

Measure 4 has a vibrato symbol on the 4 note, or the upbeat of beat 3. The vibrato symbol
is a small, bold, wavy line above the music. Vibrato means you wiggle the string back and
forth to rapidly raise and lower the pitch of the note; oftentimes, this will help to sound
more in tune, but can take away from or add to the feeling of music if used. Too much
vibrato can sound unpleasant, but just enough can really add to a song. The next symbol
looks like a slash (/) and is called a slide. A slide is performed by plucking a note and
sliding your finger up (/) or down (\) the fretboard.

The bottom half of the example is called tablature. It consists of 6 lines, one for each
string of your guitar, and has numbers on each line. These numbers show which fret to
play. If numbers are stacked, they are chords. Tablature has many downfalls. Since every
other instrument uses regular notation music, it is difficult and sometimes impossible for a
guitarist to communicate with a flute or piano player. Tab is a quick way out, and because
of that a lot of guitarists only know how to read tablature. Tab has its own symbols as
well, but for the most part they are self-explanatory. If there are any confusing symbols
used in further lessons, they will be explained.
Good luck with reading music! Digging some old sheet music out of your piano bench and
trying to identify the different notes, lines, and symbols can only help you, so try your
hand at reading music!

Bass Lesson 05 - The 12 Major Scales

Scales are the base of music theory. After you learn scales, you can more fully understand
chord structures, arpeggios, improvisation and other countless concepts. Scales are a
series of notes (usually 8 notes) that when played together produce a certain feel or
mood. This article focuses on creating major scales.

The first thing you need to know is how many notes there are to choose from in order to
make your major scale. There are 12 different notes in music. When you play all of these
notes one after another, you have what is called the chromatic scale. From one tone to
another tone on the chromatic scale is called a semi tone, or half step. If you take one
tone and add two tones, it is a full step. So, to create major scales, you follow the
pattern: full, full, half, full, full, full, half. Look at the following illustration to get a
better idea of what that means.

The top line is the C chromatic scale, while the bottom line is the C major scale. The
distance between each note in the chromatic scale is a semi tone or half step. As you can
see, the bottom scale doesn't have any sharps or flats; this makes C major an easy scale to
play and learn. The bottom scale follows the major scale pattern discussed before: full,
full, half, full, full, full, half. If you want to find the A major scale, then you write out the
A chromatic scale and follow the pattern in the above picture to figure out what notes are
in A major. So, how does this fit on a fretboard?

To play the C major scale, follow along with the tablature and video closely. You will need
to know that the strings are named E A D G sequentially, and each fret toward the bridge
of the guitar will increase the pitch by one semi tone. First, take a look at this illustration
to see how the notes lie on the fretboard.
Once you can play the Cmaj scale, take the pattern that you just played and move each
note up by one fret, or one semitone. Now you have the C#maj scale, or the Dbmaj scale;
they contain the same notes, just with different names. We will talk more about the
nature of sharps and flats in the next lesson. The point is that you can move the pattern
anywhere on the bass neck and have a major scale. To figure out what key the major scale
is in, simply figure out the first note you are starting on; this is called the root. So, if you
start on the 4th fret on the E string, you will have an Ab as your root note and follow the
full, full, half, full, full, full, half pattern from that Ab to play the Abmaj scale. If you
haven't quiet grasped the concept of patterns, imagine playing the Cmaj scale you just
learned, and forget what fret you are on. Move your hand up or down and play the same
pattern as if you were starting on the C note. The great thing about guitars is that you can
physically play all of the major scales using the same scale pattern. The Emaj scale will
feel and look the same as the Amaj scale, the only difference is what it sounds like and
what fret you start on.
I recommend that you follow through with the video. As it is probably the first video you
will watch to get started playing bass, it contains very valuable audible and visual
information that you may miss out on if you skip it. And I also recommend you have fun!