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Do You Practice the Easy Songs?

#41
It depends. Some of it can be fairly excruciating to practice, so I usually just run through it prior to a show. I try to stay away from the mind numbing stuff when practicing at home but just try to make sure I'm familiar with it so I don't make any stupid mistakes. A band I sub for sometimes plays a lot of the cheesy easies, so Ill play the three chord Monty with them at rehearsals but getting motivated to go over it at home can be a real chore for me. I hate it, actually.

That's not to say what I enjoy practicing is complicated by any stretch, but it's got SOUL. Practicing and learning more complicated stuff can be fun but since I don't really like listening to very technical/progressive music (sorry, but not much Rush, Yes or Zappa in my library), I don't do it much. I find zero enjoyment in listening to music made for the sake of playing an instrument, rather than for stuff that's playing an instrument for the sake of music and I think my personal practice regimen and taste reflects that.
 
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#42
I play what ever song that pops into my head. I don't care about volume, just enough to hear the bass is good enough for me. I don't worry about timing because I've never had much problem with that aspect of my playing. I do concentrate on note intervals and their locations on the board. Dexterity goes down hill as we get older so, that to me is always a challenge.
 
#43
One word......................Bach!!!!!!:hyper::bassist::hyper:

Ever since I started studying a lot of his bass lines I find that everything else I do seems to come much more easily.

So I guess I would say that there is some merit to studying, practicing, and playing the "difficult" stuff because your fingers tend to flow much more easily when you give them a break with the "easy" stuff. (whatever one defines that to be)

Goodness knows I'm no expert here as I can't even read music, but personally, I spend 60% of my time practicing classical bass lines, 30% between blues & jazz, and the remaining 10% between funk & R&B. (yes, all tab)
 
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#44
Since I am working on getting up to speed with a new band (and 18 original songs) I’m concentrating on all of them but do spend more time with the difficult ones. The easy ones I come back to as I have the more difficult material nailed down, just to be sure that my parts are solid and I don’t need to change anything. The vast majority of the difficulties are more about endurance rather than note selection or particular passages. I haven’t been in a band like this in 5 years so some of those skills haven’t been utilized much.

If I was just finding songs to jam to, then it’s up to whatever comes out of the mp3 player. Usually I just load a bunch of songs on my mp3 player, hit random and go. Often this leads to songs that vary in challenge, and many that I have never played along with.
 
#46
most of my at home practice was focused on memorizing. So that meant mostly hard stuff.

With a band we would run through everything and again if it wasnt clicking No matter how simple it was.

After all im not playing with the famous people on the recording. Im with 3 schmucks who may or may not have been practicing to the same version i was... if they bothered practicing at all. But those are the guys i got to try and make sound good.
 
#49
Yes....I often practise "easy" songs......one can become so tied up in complex works that you forget the "simplicity".

When I do this I concentrate more on the pattern/style/timing/beat of the song than the song itself...

I practise easy Samba, easy Bossanova, easy Shuffle, easy 4/4, easy Funk patterns, easy Rock, easy Reggae.....etc etc etc etc.

The idea being to be completely familiar with the patterns at will........
 

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