Teaching your kid bass

[DaZombieWoof]

Okay. My 13 year old daughter wants to play bass. She is musically literate having played clarinet, alto sax, and tenor sax.

Obviously, she's got to learn where the notes are and get the fingers so they can survive. I am an OCD setup guy so her bass will be as easy to play as is reasonable.

I am thinking majoring on how to "read" chords and progressions to understand what notes you can put out there safely, dependent on the checks your fingers can cash.

Anybody done this?

[BassChuck]

Teaching your own kid can be a bit difficult. I'm a music teacher, and all my kids play instruments BUT I sent them to private teachers and then helped them as needed. Sometimes the family baggage can get in the way of learning.

As far as what to teach her. Take some of the songs she learned on clarinet and sax, transpose them to bass clef and start there. Keeping one foot in familar territory is always a good idea with begining students (even if you are related!). Once she get at ease with the bass you can move into more 'bass' kind of things, standard rhythms, scales, chords etc etc. She's young. There's plenty of time.

[DaZombieWoof]

Her mom teaches sax, clarinet, and piano. There is need for the sax students and, I think, the piano students to have a bass player support some combo stuff for them to play on. I will have to look at the parts she's playing these days on tenor. She's at the point in band where one can be a star by actually practicing, something her director appreciates. It's funny because the high school she will eventually go to has the rep of having a band that can kick their football team's butt.

[St Drogo]

Hmm. I was going to tell you to teach it proper values and how to stick up for itself later in life, but it seems you are talking about teaching a child how to play bas, not about raising a little bass into an adult bass. My bad.

[BigOldHarry]

Originally Posted by BassChuck

Teaching your own kid can be a bit difficult. I'm a music teacher, and all my kids play instruments BUT I sent them to private teachers and then helped them as needed. Sometimes the family baggage can get in the way of learning.

As far as what to teach her. Take some of the songs she learned on clarinet and sax, transpose them to bass clef and start there. Keeping one foot in familar territory is always a good idea with begining students (even if you are related!). Once she get at ease with the bass you can move into more 'bass' kind of things, standard rhythms, scales, chords etc etc. She's young. There's plenty of time.

THIS

Unless your daughter can get her head around the "role shift" that is required to go from Dad to Teacher, this will be *really* tough.

[tZer]

Originally Posted by BigOldHarry

THIS

Unless your daughter can get her head around the "role shift" that is required to go from Dad to Teacher, this will be *really* tough.

THIS +1 and +1 to what BigOldHarry was THISing...

That said, I started to acquaint both of my kids with bass a few years ago and they have a short scale Squire sitting there waiting for their desire to ignite.

But when I was showing them stuff, I simply showed them the basics - how to hold it, pluck it, fret properly and so forth. Then I showed them both how the bass factors into simple I, IV, V progressions. The could both 'root' along with me while I played some simple blues.

But they were both only 7 at the time and their ability to do what BigOldHarry said was just not there. They both started taking piano lessons at that time too - as planned.

Piano is the be-all-end-all of kick-off instruments and starting kids early on it prepares them musically for just about any instrument choice down the road.

One thing I've found to be a common story from some great players is that their parents were always listening to, playing, singing - and there were always instruments around. The idea that they'd play at some point was never a question of if - but when.