I'm looking for exercises to improve my string crossings. I found out that my speed when playing 1 string is ok, but I lack speed when crossing strings..
I read about the Gary Willis technique, but I'm looking for some general exercises too. Any idea's?

Cheers

btw; I'm on my way to the Gary Willes site at this very moment.

The Right and Left Hand Techniques course at musicdojo.com has a bunch of string crossing exercises. You may want to check it out.

Tim

Some of the stuff on Music Dojo is based on Adam Nitti's lessons (go fig since he's part of Music Dojo).

http://www.adamnitti.com/bass_player_02.shtml

That page has a tiny bit of help on string crossing exercises to get you started. It's pretty easy to start developing your own after that. But if you need something that's already been proven then I highly suggest either taking the Music Dojo lesson on right and left hand technique or buying the book "Bass Fitness," which is basically a ton of permutation based bass exercises.

Per my teacher, arpeggios and inversions are a good string crossing and skipping exercise, on top of the obvious value of practicing those things..

What are the obvious excercises? I really need all the help I can get here.

Here is an example of string crossing excerises, for a 2 finger approach.

---------------------
--------0--------0---
-----0--------0------
--0--------0---------

i m i m i m (i = index, m = middle)

--------0---------0--
-----0---------------
---------------0-----
--0---------0--------

i m i m i m


And here is one going down the strings...

--0-------------------------0-
---------0----------0---------
-----0------------------0-----
------------0---0-------------

m i m i m i m i


Just some quickies I thought of, you can also try reversing the fingers, and try to start with the opposite finger. Good luck man.

Buy Jon Liebmans Funk Fusion bass method book it has many good string crossing exercises.

Gary says it's a decent introduction to his RH technique, which he says solves the hardest problem in bass playing: crossing strings going upward.

I have the video, and mostly I'm using his close position; at the moment large interval skips are the exception for me rather than the rule, but that's because I haven't explored that aspect much.

I adopted the major scale exercise in the right-hand section to all the scale and arpeggio exercises I practice, of which there are about 35 or so right now, about to be approx 41 as I get them under my fingers.

I have commited to Gary's rh technique when I practice, and let it happen when I play, which it has been doing more and more. I'm relatively starting out with this, and am not quite ready to take on the fingerboard harmony book, but I think that will change very soon as I almost have the new chordscales working pretty well.

On the video, he shows an exercise involving the open position, and says start at like 30 bpm or so until you make sure you're doing all the muting with your right hand... once you do that, inch up the metronome... then he proceeds to show the exercise at about 600 bpm :) I'm still at 30... sigh...