Over the years I've accumulated quite a collection of electric bass books and study material. A lot of it I worked through 'back in the day', starting in the early 1980s with Chuck Rainey's 'Complete Electric Bass Player' series, and 'one-off' things from Clive Harrison, Rick Laird, Joe Hubbard, Adam Novik and the like. Others I've picked up more recently, as much out of curiosity as well as to try to keep things fresh. Taken alongside each other they all start to look very much alike - different takes on the same 'stuff'.
In terms of methods, the 'Complete' version of Friedland/Hal Leonard Bass Method (HLBM) sets the current standard, but over time and in a
"GOAT Shoot-out", I would place the 1985 Chuck Rainey Method (book 1 in the 'Complete Electric Bass Player 'series) at the top. Both are Standard Notation and both include more than enough to get a non-reader going - the HLBM has slower start from a lower level so is probably better in that regard, but overall the Rainey book will take you further. Compared to the HLBM, the topics covered by Rainey go to greater depth and within each topic there are several exercises which start simple then go on to be more challenging than anything in HLBM.
The Jeff Berlin reading stuff is good material but really needs to be used either alongside a method book or under the guidance of a teacher - it is devoid of anything connecting the music on the page to the physical execution of the music on the instrument.
For someone looking to sight-read, the Sight-Reading Studies collections from Robert Anthony are excellent, and Rick Appleman's "Reading Contemporary Electric Bass" is also pretty good.
I have a few of the 'Walking' books (Pattitucci, Berlin, Fuqua, Tate, etc.) - the principles of Walking Bass are long established and largely unchanging, so any one of these would have done fine.
I have a handful of 'deep dives', such as "Standing in the Shadows of Motown", Ed Friedland's "Reggae" treatise, the excellent "Latin Bass Book" by Oscar Stagnaro & Chuck Sher and a couple of the
"<Insert Name of Your Favourite Player Here>" transcription books that I would hazard everyone has and rarely opens.
Through all of this, whilst I've had a good deal of music education and training, I've never once had a bass lesson. Electric bass tuition didn't really exist when I started out, so Rainey was pretty much the only thing going apart from one-page articles in magazines. Thankfully, back then, Guitar Player had some pretty good bass contributors - Jeff Berlin, Herb Mickman, Carol Kaye, Stanley Clarke, Bunny Brunel amongst them. In 1984 they put out a book with all of the collected bass articles in one place, called simply 'Electric Bass Guitar'. There was no structured or progressive 'method' to any of it, but on some level or other it covered pretty much anything you could think of. By the late '80s it was out of print and the original 1984 edition is pretty much lost in time. But a revised edition was published by Hal Leonard under ISBN 0881889075. I suspect it is out of print again but IME is worth a look, if only for the Mickman stuff.
www.facebook.com
What a difference a day makes. Good looking out. Peace
