Seminal songs for bass improvement?
 

Good Morning

Curious on what tunes gave you a landmark piece of learning on bass, for any style, technique. (Im not neccesarily asking which are the hardest tunes you ever learned)

thanks!

That's a good question. For me, it would probably be "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush, because getting those fast runs down took a lot of time and effort, and getting it made all my playing smoother. I thought I would never get it, but after much hard work it finally came, and learning that lesson probably was the best lesson of all. I'm no virtuoso bass player, by any means, but now I think I can do anything if I'm willing to put in the work.

Iron Maiden's Killers (1981) album helped me a lot when I was trying to get more accurate with speed and timing. Also Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell (1980). Both of these albums were great to play the whole way through and helped me a lot in my early days. :-) The songs are all good and fun to play.

A big challenge for me early on was Stone Temple Pilots "Plush". It has a lot of movement that is reminicent of Jamerson. It's still one of my favorite lines to play.


In other news...this thread is probably in the wrong section of the forum.

Abbey Road, the entire record was very fun to learn and analyze. Not really hard, but pretty smart and creative.

when i was 25 or so I started a cover band with an excellent guitar player -- I was a guitarist too so I switched to bass. One song he wanted us to do was living color's "cult of personality."

I had to learn which parts to play to do a convincing fake! No wrong notes, just some notes left out during the fast parts. It took many months before I was able to play that properly.

cool. Keep em coming! :) thank you

I started off with James Jamerson bass line of 'What's going On'. Note for note...then Jamerson on 'I was made to love her' because it had faster fingering style. Third was Pino Palladino on 'Monday Afternoon' when he was PSP. Then came the milestone that I'm still working on which is Pino with the John Mayer Trio play bass on 'Who did you think I was'. Still haven't gotten that down yet. I'm particularly a Jamerson/Palladino fan because they just don't stick to all low notes. I've learned others but those were my quintessential bass riffs that I was determine to learn.

That's a killer song. I still can't play it too cleanly.