Please Help Me Improve My Technique (General Topic for General Discussion)

[blankstare77]

Hello. I posted this in the General Instruction forum, but I made a mistake. I feel that it's more appropriate here.

The question is:

Can you please isolate each key element in playing? (An analogy that I have as a brass player here is Flexibility, Range, Tone, Technique)

The elements I can think of for Bass Guitar are:
Right Hand technique
Left Hand technique
Tone
Learning the notes on the neck
Flexibility
Finger Strength
etc.


Also, once you have identified each of these aspects in playing, can you explain to me how to better each of these areas in general terms? (The beauty for brass playing is that I know each area on how to better yourself: For tone, do long tones. For flexibility, do lip slurs. For technique, simply do tonguing exercises. This is preferably how boiled down the information should be.)

[2 Fingers McGee]

Relax. For the most part, it's fairly self-explanatory: when you realize you're all tensed up, just relax. But something else that will help is when a particular part is giving you trouble, practice it at a really slow tempo, until you can get it while being completely relaxed, then raise it up a little bit. You'll be more comfortable playing that part and thus it will be easier to remain relaxed while playing it.

[mward69]

I can vouch for that, I HATED playing slow to get anything down. I wanted to play it at MY tempo and so on. I've been playing for years and still have to slow down sometimes, it's frustrating but before you know it, you will see the pay off.

[Sarbecue Boss]

train your ear, practice dynamics and train your ear

[Deacon_Blues]

Play various exercises for right and left hand technique issues and play songs for ear training. Dynamics is about feel, so that should be practiced by playing songs too. The technique on how to play dynamically can be trained using exercises though. Someone presented a good exercise here recently for that.

I also know a good warm-up exercise:

-1-------------4-5-------------2-3-------------6-7-------------4-5-------
---2---------3-----4---------3-----4---------5-----6---------5-----6-----
-----3-----2---------3-----4---------5-----4---------5-----6---------7---
-------4-1-------------2-5-------------6-3-------------4-7-------------8-ect....
 
 I M R P I M R P P R M I P R M I I M R P etc.
(Left hand fingering: I=Index, M=Middle, R=Ring, P=Pinky)

You should get the pattern from that tab. Play it up as high on the neck as possible and back down again in reverse order.