Climbing fast

[alexit]

So I've been doing a lot of scale practice lately, and am pretty good at playing different scales from the lowest to highest note on the bass and vice versa. I can climb pretty fast playing from note to note, but lately I've been trying to do little licks that are way up above the main bassline, and losing sight of the where the patttern should be relative to the high position. Yeah, I know that those little dots on the guitar repeat themselves up an octave (sheesh , so that's a basic guide, but is there any other strategy to use? I keep running out of strings, so there's nowhere to go but up, and really quick.

[louieeadg]

slow down and make things a little more simple.

[DocBop]

You are playing bass not guitar the groove, music, has to come first. As a bass player you have to keep the bottom together and doing all sorts of fills the bottom drops out, especially if you can't drop right back into the groove. I think you playing is telling you to focus on the bass-ic's and leave the fancy stuff alone for awhile.

If want to spend a couple seconds on this in practice then grab your metronome. Set it to click on 2 and 4. Then start playing a simple bass line/groove with good feel. Now do 3 bars of groove then jump up above the 12th fret and play 1 bar (or less) of fill and drop back into the groove. Remember getting back into the groove is the most important part of the exercise not the fills.

Listen to Marcus Miller he can play some amazing fills and solos, but the groove never goes away. In fact in his solo he will drop down and re-establish the groove ten back up the neck. Holding the bottom is job #1 for the bass everything else secondary.

[louieeadg]

Well said, well said.

[alexit]

It's not a rhythm issue; I never said I'm abandoning the groove. It's not being able to get up and down the neck and keep the time, it's losing sight of the fingering pattern for a certain scale/mode that far up on the neck. Everytime I go up it's like, "cool, here I am, now which notes to play."

[owensea777]

Use a visual guide like the one on www.studybass.com (the fingerboard printer), and practice. You will eventually memorize the scales high on the neck.
I'm not quite sure if I understand your problem though? Timing problems can be worked out with metronome practice. Are you saying that, because the frets are closer together higher up on the neck, you forget the fingering patterns of your scales? If that's the case, use a visual guide at first and practice.

[MacNilly]

I would take it scale by scale. Learn the different positions of a scale from 1st fret up to 12th. Anything past that repeats. There are "modes" of every scale, one thing about these modes is they allow you to translate patterns around the neck. Anyways, for what you want to do (play a riff in key, high up on the neck), I would experiement slowly and go 12 frets higher and try to play the same lick as I did down low. Have an 8 note riff, play the first 4 notes on the low strings then shift up play the rest. ect,ect...

[JimmyM]

You learned the first octave, now learn the next. There are no shortcuts. You just learn it the same way you did the bottom octave.