Hey everyone, I just bought a used bass the other day and was wondering what are some good exercises and simple songs to start with? Thanks in advance for any help.

hello :D

Well what sort of style were you looking to play?

Will you be playing with your fingers? with a pick? slap? It is a little tough to give you the best advice without knowing what sort of style you are looking for.

well I want to play with my fingers mostly, and later on maybe slap. I've been trying to play a few Weezer and Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, but I think my problem is that im having a little trouble just hearing the bass parts in the songs

About hearing the bass parts... go download Audacity, it is free. Then use the filters to filter out everything but the bass part and put the bass up to +12db. You should be able to hear it then! As an added bonus, Audacity contains a FFT that can tell you the frequency spectrum of a particular passage. You can use that to determine the key and even specific notes if you select a small enough sample. It also can slow the tempo without changing the pitch for those particularly hard passages.

Have fun!

Ox.

PS: I am in no way affiliated with the Audacity project except as a user. Even if I was, its free, so what would I gain?!

A link:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Ox.

That was a problem for me early on too. After awhile you begin to hear the bass in every song you listen to. Sometimes I find myself not even listening to songs as a whole because I'm so concentrated on the bass. At first people don't seem to hear the bass because it blends everything together, it just takes time and effort to be able to dissect everything in a songs. Keep with it and you'll thank yourself later on.

As for learning songs: You have the right idea IMO trying to learn Weezer because for the most part it's very simple and the rhythms are pretty straight forward (from what I remember), anyway. Since you are so new I would even go as far as to suggest tabs (power tabs are great for beginners) so that you start to understand what the bass is doing. Practice learning the songs slowly while doing everything correctly and in no time you'll be in full speed. You'll also probably want to consider heading down to the music store and buying a couple books on bass technique. If you start out doing everything right you will advance very rapidly and the pay off will be well worth your efforts. Anything I can do to help, let me know. :cool:

btw, Thanks OX for that great link! Just what I've been looking for! :D

No problem! That is one killer little program, just dig around in it a little and you will find all kind of neat things. It is my audio swiss army knife.

Ox.

thanks for the help everyone