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Saturday, July 11, 2009

Learn How To Play Bass Guitar: Have Fun While Practicing

By Marshal Washington

Have you considered online bass guitar lessons? What usually gets people started with bass guitar is the desire to form a band, or to be a part of a band. Maybe you already know how to play guitar, and your friends play guitar too--but you all can't be the lead guitarist or the rhythm guitarist. Someone needs to play bass. Maybe that someone is you.

The bass student will find more reward in learning the varied methods, namings, visualizing and thinking of chord, scale, and arpeggio patterns on the fretboard. In some ways, the differences are minor, but often they can be very obvious and the benefit of learning them can easily result in transitioning around the fretboard easily.

Take a regular guitar (which is tuned from the thickest to the lowest string- E - A - D - G - B - E) and exclude the two thinnest strings at the bottom and what is left is basically a bass guitar with thinner strings. Bass playing is usually note-oriented and not chord-oriented. This means that single notes are hit more often in bass playing and this scheme is the essential element of bass playing, one should be familiar with the tunings and the notes in a regular guitar to be able to decently play the bass guitar.

Identify the parts of the bass guitar. There are typically four strings, and the components are very similar to a guitar. The thickest string is the E (the topmost), followed by A, D, and G, and are also referred to as 4, 3, 2, and 1 respectively. On the neck of the guitar forming a grid-like pattern with the strings are metal strips called frets that make the notes produced higher as it goes farther from you.

Now that you're aware of this relation, you'll need a place for a start. By that, I mean where to start when it comes to actually playing the bass guitar? Scales are a great place, not only because of the technique skills you gain, but really learning music while you're practicing bass.

Attacking The Strings: The most important part to remember while starting to take slap bass lessons is the amount of intensity used to attack the strings. Now that you know the proper hand positioning and wrist movement you must know how to attack the strings with your thumb. With your thumb in position as described under the Hand Positioning section strike the low E string with the middle knuckle of your thumb and hit it pretty hard to get that classic "thump' sound and then immediately release.

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.

Not only do they need to know the right pattern to use and how to execute them in many different ways, but they also need to know how to practice with them. Regular practice with the proper set of fretboard patterns is a necessary component of becoming a seasoned player, time must be spent with practice, but it is important to know how to practice so that hours a day are not spent with insufficient result. - 18758

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