practice

[thunderbolt]

hello, first off I want to say how cool it is that you have your own forum here. I'm still fairly new to talkbass, but I've been a fan since Sea Change and Ima Robot came out. I also found out that you were the bass player for NIN and would be playing Bonnaroo 2009 while I was waiting in line for 10 hours to gain entrance to the festival. Needless to say, it made that sweat drenched afternoon a bit more bearable.

Now for my question: how do you practice? How long do you practice for, how often, and what kinds of things do you focus on when you practice?

On a related note: what do you think is the most important/useful thing for a rookie bassist such as myself to focus on?

Thanks for your time.

[jmjbassplayer]

Hi Thunderbolt, thank you for the cool complements!

Of late, I'm so so so bad at practice. I just don't have it in me. When Trent would give me another NIN song to prepare from the catalog, I'd literally throw together a chord chart and play it two or three times. Sometimes that's all any of us would have time for, learning extremely high production-value NIN songs the night before a gig. It would mean that I might be SLIGHTLY underprepared at rehearsal, but in a way, it added some fire and life to things. I love to challenge myself sometimes with the most minimal preparation IF I'm in a trusting scenario, so that I can stretch my ear skills and exercise my instincts a little bit.

Now that I'm off tour, I think I need a practice regimen.

Most important thing to practice:

- clapping with a metronome and making the "beats disappear". Do a search, I've described this process elsewhere here.

- Singing while playing lines, no matter what instrument you want to do it on. You need to train your ear to recognize the color and timbre of different modes. Even as simple as really knowing, with unerring certainty, what the 3rd, 4th, 5th and flat 7th (and probably 9th) are going to sound like in the key you're playing in BEFORE you play the note, ergo ear training.

Good luck!
Justin

[FernandoDANTE]

Did you guys rehearse all those Gary Numan/Peter Murphy/Joy Division/Gang of Four covers before the final leg of the Wave Goodbye tour? Or were those songs rehearsed only a few days before each gig? Honestly, I was impressed at the amount of songs that were never played before.

[jmjbassplayer]

Some were rehearsed day of show. NONE were rehearsed in a proper long-term rehearsal scenario. You'd be surprised all you can fit in during an hour-long soundcheck.

[JimmyM]

Originally Posted by jmjbassplayer

Some were rehearsed day of show. NONE were rehearsed in a proper long-term rehearsal scenario. You'd be surprised all you can fit in during an hour-long soundcheck.

You bet! That's the story of my life...rehearsing a bunch of songs I don't know at soundcheck for the gig that night. We usually budget a little more time than that, but it's a lot more common than some people realize.

[Earwaxsculptor]

When I was playing gigs one of my favorite things to do was play the songs we had written a few days prior.......man I loved the rush of feeling like it could fall apart at any given moment in time.....

shameless plug time.....here is a link to exactly that type of moment, this is a clip an old friend put up from the long long ago when I actually was in one of those band things, it's us playing a song we just wrote to close out a show. I think we pulled it off pretty well all things considered:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jipxYyBgkjY


JMJ,

A good friend of mine who attended The Musicians Institute in L.A. and is now a bass teacher had mentioned the same thing to me about clapping to a metronome, that is great advice. He told me that while at school that is the first thing they taught and they spent a ton of time on it, if you can't clap it, you aint playing it is basically what he says......now if I could only get some sort of practice routine down......I actually took over a year off of playing due to some personal reasons, so now would be the best time to implement that practice thing I guess.......haha.