Confused about difference in instructional books

[Ekulati]

A "method" in general gives you a variety of exercises, tools, tidbits in order to get around and learn the notes of your instrument, scales, fingerings, etc. Maybe including some basic theory. A theory book usually assumes you know the basics and are ready to learn about chords, keys, how they interact, and how to construct bass lines from knowledge rather that simply putting your fingers where the tab tells you to.

IMO, and I get a lot of flack for this here, but I contend that a good, versatile bassist is often the band member who knows the most theory. There are other approaches though, but in my view they may limit the genres you can play.

 

[N4860]

I don't think this is the best way to learn how to play music. Tabs I mean.

Tabs don't teach you the rhythm and if you are only using tabs and not your ear then your learning curve will be much steeper. I can't comment on any of the methods because I am not familiar with them. When I started to learn bass I would attempt to learn parts by ear. I wasn't very good at playing it note for note so I would have to come up with my own lines that sounded good, to me, playing along with the recording.

Many tabs do show the rhythm.

 

[Keith Favara]

I look for books that include audio of the exercises with standard notation. That way you can “read along” with the notation as you listen. Put the exercise audio on repeat, and read it as it goes by, get to where you can sing it (don’t worry about perfect pitch), then go to putting it under your fingers. It’s gotta be in your head first.

Your theory books will explain the subdivisions and rhythmic patterns. You’ll learn about how the keys are organized, scales, and chords.

Tab shows you where one guy thinks you should be putting your fingers, sometimes it’s right, sometimes not. You’ll play things differently as you progress. Its really weak on rhythm.

And that’s how you learn any new language, listening, reading, speaking. Then you repeat what you’ve heard, read, and understood.

You learn to compose your own bass lines by studying what the guys you like did in the styles you play.

Check out Mark at talkingbass.com for some great free lessons with notation.

Hey.....just wanted to thank you for your reply. I somehow missed your post(i've gotten a decent amount of feedback which I'm pretty thrilled about)until now, but I kinda did what you were suggesting for the first time yesterday before i saw your post. So....I've been trying to learn the song "Money" from Pink Floyd from a tab book that uses a hybrid system of notation....and I've gotten somewhat decent at it. I didn't look up what some things meant so when i was playing I would play and then when i saw the term "To Coda" I figured that this is simple.....I'll just go the part that says Coda!!! It seemed logical to me.......after all it told me to!! So I would go to the Coda and as you know it didn't go to well after that. So, finally I took the tab book out.........put on a Youtube video of a guy playing the song on his bass(with the backing track) and I just followed along in my book without playing at all. Doing that allowed me to see the order in which the song was played and caused me to look at the notation and figure out why some parts were being repeated when to me it looks like you would just cruise straight into the next bar of the notation. Some parts actually have "repeat 4 times" written so I was good with that. But i had no idea that |: :| meant to repeat whatever is inbetween 1 time. The really big thing was when listening and following along in the book I could see how to handle the parts that say D.S al Coda, To Coda and Coda. Since logically to someone who doesn't know it seems like a mystery. I was really, really focused when the song would come up to those parts.....I was like a kid watching a super intense movie scene........leaning forward, wondering what was going to happen!!! It worked out really well......I paused it after the D.S. al coda part to see where the heck it jumped to then I looked up the term on the internet and that's when the light bulb went on and it started to make sense. Like you said......it's a new language. I actually have that whole course on Youtube by Mark at talkingbass.com saved to my favorites.....I've listened to the first part of it, but wanted some written material too. I think his youtube lessons have links to notes about the lesson so maybe i'll get them printed up too at some point. Thanks again........sorry about the long winded post here.

 

[Keith Favara]

Many tabs do show the rhythm.

I only own 2 bass tab books, but they do show rhythm in them. The one is a hybrid system of notation that has what looks like tab, but has the stems for the actual music notation right below the numbers that tell you which fret to play on and it has all the symbols and terms to for regular music notation. The other book i have has both tab and musical notation completely separate.

 

[Keith Favara]

A "method" in general gives you a variety of exercises, tools, tidbits in order to get around and learn the notes of your instrument, scales, fingerings, etc. Maybe including some basic theory. A theory book usually assumes you know the basics and are ready to learn about chords, keys, how they interact, and how to construct bass lines from knowledge rather that simply putting your fingers where the tab tells you to.

IMO, and I get a lot of flack for this here, but I contend that a good, versatile bassist is often the band member who knows the most theory. There are other approaches though, but in my view they may limit the genres you can play.

Thanks for your reply. It love all the feedback that I'm getting from this post. I thought it would be like crickets after putting up my initial post, but it's been the complete opposite. I did order both books and the method one will be here either tomorrow or Wednesday so that'll be the first one that i start on. The theory one is going to take a week or two to get here. But from what you are saying it sounds like going through the method books first is the way to go so that will work out good.

 

[Keith Favara]

Just finishing up the Hal Leonard book here after maybe 3 months. I think it's great. The last section (ok - no - the last section is on slap/pop) is on creating lines from chord notations. Really informative, but you need to know what notes are in the chords to really make it work. So, you gotta churn through the rest first. Some of it is quite challenging, at least for me. But with time and repetition, it comes around.

Ariana's book is in the queue, but it's the Lost Art of Country Bass first for me.

I found a music training app for my phone to help me with the bass clef note reading. A few minutes here and there with that has helped a lot.

Yeah on the tab. That's all I did 20 years ago with my first bass venture. MP3's and tabs. Regret it now.

Thanks for your reply. I have the Hal Leonard books coming tomorrow or the next day. It's going to be interesting for sure. Not sure how this little journey into understanding more in depth how to play is going to work out, but for me personally even if stick with theory and then only use the regular music notation I don't think I'll regret using tabs. At least I hope not. Could i look back and say that Tab stunted my growth in learning the instrument and wonder where the heck i would be if i had just skipped the tabs at first?? Sure, but I think Tab is a good building block....it gave me some positives to reference back in my head. Just being able to play parts of songs gives me more confidence because every song I attempt to play I just couldn't when i first started so i can look back and say....."well......you didn't think you'd be able to play this and you did". I also think timing is big in all things in life....for whatever reason sometimes you are just not ready to take on something yet or you take it on too soon. You might be perfectly capable of doing it, but since the timing isn't right you just aren't motivated or interested enough to actually do it or attempt to do it. Then at some point for whatever reason it interests you enough to give it a try. I certainly didn't plan this little journey into theory...it happened naturally. Actually.......in my case the tab book that I'm using to play the song "money" by pink floyd kinda was the last little thing that pushed me into exploring learning more than just tab. The tab book i have uses a hybrid system of notation and it condenses the songs.....so it has Coda's and To Coda's and DS Al Coda's and repeat symbols and i knew nothing about any of those so i'd play the tab.....skip parts.......and be generally lost on how to play the whole song if i wanted to. I was skipping alot of repeated stuff, but I thought i sounded decent so it didn't bother me, but then eventually I wanted to play the whole song and I started looking closer at the notations while listening to a youtube video of some guy playing the song on bass. So.....that was really the beginning of me looking into learning more about playing the bass and without that tab book and me getting confused over some things I don't know if that would've happened at all. I think the journeys that everyone takes to learning something(anything actually) are pretty darn interesting and i hope you are enjoying yours. You have a great rest of your day and thanks for the reply. If you have any other advice let me know.

 

[Keith Favara]

I do have one question for everyone around here. So.....i do love and appreciate all replies that I've gotten. This is apparently a pretty accepting community that just wants to help out in whatever way they can. I was super worried that i was going to get a verbal beating for saying that i played exclusively using tabs up until now and even if someone who replied didn't like tabs they still put it in a pretty nice way instead of just putting up a wall and holding it against me. Good lord....for someone who doesn't talk so much I really am blabbing on this forum. The question I have whether they get rid of these posts eventually or do they just stay up forever. Do they archive them eventually to free up room on their server?? I'm guessing that has to be the case since storage isn't infinite. So if i'm correct is there a way for me to download/save all the responses so that i can refer back to them in the future?? Thanks a billion times for your replies.....i don't know any of you at all, but you guys are the best!!!!!!!

 

[Malcolm35]

Use the search button. Search your posts, or all on a specific topic.
How long they live, i'll have to leave to a Mod. I have no idea.

Yes we do seem to get along here.

 

[bassliner50]

Hal Leonard 1,2,3 is a very good start and over view.

 

[nnnnnn]

Do they archive them eventually to free up room on their server?? I'm guessing that has to be the case since storage isn't infinite. So if i'm correct is there a way for me to download/save all the responses so that i can refer back to them in the future??

By the time this thread gets to be as old as some of the existing threads still available here you probably won't need to refer back to it, you'll already have learnt all the stuff you're currently asking about.

Having said that, if you are viewing the forum on a computer your browser probably has an option to save the current page to your hard drive (you would have to save each page of the thread separately), or if you select your browser's print option you might be able to "print" the current page to a PDF. Or you can just select all the text (or just the bits you care about) and copy/paste into Word.

 

[Keith Favara]

By the time this thread gets to be as old as some of the existing threads still available here you probably won't need to refer back to it, you'll already have learnt all the stuff you're currently asking about.

Having said that, if you are viewing the forum on a computer your browser probably has an option to save the current page to your hard drive (you would have to save each page of the thread separately), or if you select your browser's print option you might be able to "print" the current page to a PDF. Or you can just select all the text (or just the bits you care about) and copy/paste into Word.

Oh yeah.....I have used that before, but it's been a while. Thanks for refreshing my memory. OH.....and you are probably correct that I will already know everything that was suggested in the replies by the time this gets taken down.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[shwashwa]

Improviser's bass method (chuck sher)

 

[kevindahl]

Just wanted to say thanks for your reply. That's pretty interesting that when you started to learn bass you would learn by ear. That's another thing that I would love to learn how to do myself. So....were you already really familiar with how each note sounded when you first started?? Or did you have to drill it into your head how each sounded and then try to listen to the music and guess at what notes to play??

Good question. When I was 14 I joined our High School Band. The previous bass player graduated. The teacher handed me a bass and an instructional book. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't even turn the amp on for 2 or 3 months!

A short story...

A classmate had a cousin who played guitar and was going to visit him. He told his cousin that I "played" bass and he seemed open to jamming. His cousin asked me to bring some records over with songs I wanted to play. This was around 1976 in a very small community in northern Canada. There was no internet, TV, and limited radio.

So I bring my bass and some records. He asks me to put on the first song I want to play. It was walk this way by Aerosmith. As the song is playing he starts to play along with it. I was dumbfounded! Seriously! I thought there were only a handful of people that could actually listen to music and then play it. Needless to say I thought this guy was the coolest. He soon found out how crappy I was but was patient and just encouraged me to use my ear.

It was tedious process and I am sure the songs I was attempting to play sucked. Not knowing any other musicians didn't help. When the 1st Van Halen record came out I wanted to learn Runnin with the Devil. Very simple bass line right? It didn't make sense to me because they are tuned to Eb. I couldn't figure it out. lol

Some suggestions for you to start learning by ear.
-pick songs that you love and are simple
-pick songs where the bass is clear and higher in the mix
-learn other parts other than the bass. I wish I would have done this earlier on in my development. Try to play the vocal melody, a guitar riff, or a piano lick for example
-if you cant hear or figure out a part sing it

 

[lark_z]

Another thought, get software (audacity is one) and take your mp3s and change the EQ to drop the treble and boost the bass, then save that as a new file. This has helped me a LOT.

 

[SteveCS]

I only own 2 bass tab books, but they do show rhythm in them. The one is a hybrid system of notation that has what looks like tab, but has the stems for the actual music notation right below the numbers that tell you which fret to play on and it has all the symbols and terms to for regular music notation. ....

That's not a hybrid, it's called full TAB. The version with just fret numbers and no rhythm is called simplified TAB. Unfortunately it is also the most common...

 

[FantasticFour]

I have found that most books work for me except for Ariane Cap's and Tony Grey's.
On the other side of the spectrum, anything written by Ed Friedman is cool.
It has nothing to do with being a good or a bad method. Sure, some are betters than others, but even the best ones can let you down.
I think it all boils down to anxiety. If a method underlines stuff that induces anxiety into you, even if you're not aware of that anxiety, it won't work. Your reptilian brain won't let it.

 

[nnnnnn]

That's not a hybrid, it's called full TAB. The version with just fret numbers and no rhythm is called simplified TAB. Unfortunately it is also the most common...

I remember the first tab books I saw back in the 80s had a standard notation treble or bass clef staff (depending on whether it was for guitar or bass) and then the tab staff underneath. The tab part didn't usually include rhythms notated directly but it didn't bother me because it was there in the standard notation and I just read them together.

Then in the mid 90s when the web took off suddenly there was an online explosion of homemade ASCII character tabs with no rhythm because there was no practical way to notate it. But those homemade ones were often pretty unreliable anyway, and if I used them I just did rhythm from my memory of what was on the recording.

These days most of the tab I see does have rhythm notated because people are using tab software to create it. I prefer tab for guitar, but prefer bass clef plus tab for bass - I'll mostly just read the bass clef, but it can be handy to have an exact fingering spelt out in tab for the tricky bits.

 

[Keith Favara]

That's not a hybrid, it's called full TAB. The version with just fret numbers and no rhythm is called simplified TAB. Unfortunately it is also the most common...

Thanks for the correction.......like i said i'm not familiar with all the terms so i didn't know "Full Tab" from "Tab" from whatever other versions of tab there are, but it is still a hybrid of the two correct?? It seems like Full Tab probably came about originally from someone who saw the flaws in regular tab just like you do so they combined the regular music notation and tab.....so it's a hybrid of the two correct?? I'm just trying to understand the part where you said "It's not a hybrid" because when i look at it right now it completely appears to me to be a hybrid of the two. But I'm alot greener than you so you might know something I don't. I'm also not one who is completely stuck on using terms because i think sometimes they are not understood by everyone. In the computer world if you said the word "spam" to someone like my mother she wouldn't have clue what it meant, but if you describe it instead and said that "it's like junk mail" then she would get it. Just a habit it picked up because i saw people not understanding something when the general concept was easy enough to comprehend.....it's just the name that was throwing them off a bit.

 

[devnulljp]

I found a music training app for my phone to help me with the bass clef note reading. A few minutes here and there with that has helped a lot.

What's the app? I have one on my ipad called [Invalid or Expired Link Removed] and it saved my life (showed up to an audition and they placed a written score in front of me - because I'd been playing with the app, I discovered I could actually read it pretty well). I don't have an iphone though, and it doesn't run on android. Looking for an android replacement.

 

[Keith Favara]

What's the app? I have one on my ipad called [Invalid or Expired Link Removed] and it saved my life (showed up to an audition and they placed a written score in front of me - because I'd been playing with the app, I discovered I could actually read it pretty well). I don't have an iphone though, and it doesn't run on android. Looking for an android replacement.

I meant to ask this same question after i read his response. Thanks for bringing that up.