How long does it take to get good?

[SJan3]

+100. I will add that I think reading helps one "codify" rhythms. This (for me at least) makes remembering and recalling rhythms easier (I can often remember how a rhythm "looks", even if I can't remember how it sounds). I also think reading helps with awareness of note duration and, ultimately, with playing in time.

Yes! Great points. The more we look at something, the more familiar it becomes. That certainly goes for rhythms and note groupings. It's like learning another language.
Thanks for sharing.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

Once I found out that I am ADHD, it really explained a lot about how I approach things. One weakness I have is backing off of things without trying for fear it will take too long. In grad school I fought that tendency by saying no one writes a dissertation quickly. When it gets to writing, shoot for a page a day.

In music, I often have found myself thing “I’ll never learn all of that or I’m too old.” The truth, however, is more about being focused and intentional when studying or practicing. A great example is Marcus Miller. He got bass a at 14 and he was doing major gigs at 18. Of course, he could already read, but he went from Kool and the Gang to Coltrane on bass in four years because he put in the work. I think about Tracy Wormworth, a former girlfriend of Marcus Miller who went on to a great career on bass herself in a few short years because Miller’s example inspired her to work hard on bass.

I just want my goal in 2026 to be major progress on my instrument. I will know in my heart if I have done it because I will know if I have put in the work.

I think the term good is highly relative and open to self opinion, valid or not. Just keep in mind what you can’t do or what you want to do but can’t doesn’t not necessarily mean you’re a bad bassist. A lot of the displays of musical/technical pyrotechnics we see over and over again over the internet while staggering, has little value when it comes to working in an ensemble. One other point, without the ensemble the pay scale for a one man band bassist is about zilch.

For those of us with ADHD, the best way to achieve the fastest possible progress, is an established end goal with no set time frame but broken down into short achievable segments. Keep your work short and focused. And for heavens sake STOP at the first sign of frustration and or fatigue. Go do something else for a while. Ten minutes later you’ll likely be looking for something else to tackle then pick it back up, review the prior completed segments and move on to the next segment. Eventually you’ll get there, just without a lot self flagellation and or stress.

Best wishes Doc and Happy New Year.

DB

 

[Aric Bjorn]

Think Goodness
Victor Wooten

(New today)
I wonder if he reads TB sometimes? On the off chance that he does: Hi, Victor! I think you're very good, indeed!

 

[JazznFunk]

A lot of the displays of musical/technical pyrotechnics we see over and over again over the internet while staggering, has little value when it comes to working in an ensemble. One other point, without the ensemble the pay scale for a one man band bassist is about zilch.

This. And, being able to play along to band-in-a box tracks and rip solos is nowhere near the same thing as playing a supporting role with other musicians. It does help to develop aural familiarity with chords voiced a certain way, and with hearing/feeling forms to practice soloing and practical applications of scales/modes, etc. (including supportive grooves), but it's not throwing the same sorts of things at you which happen on stage with other people. That sort of 'predictable practice' thing is where Aebersold recordings were valuable for me early on in the woodshed, before customizable/randomized band-in-a-box stuff was around. It was super helpful, but only went so far. Steady, predictable, and repeatable doesn't always happen on the bandstand. I too wonder how many 'YouTube Bass Heroes' would be able to hold their own in an actual band. Some could... most wouldn't.

 

[SJan3]

Think Goodness
Victor Wooten

(New today)
I wonder if he reads TB sometimes? On the off chance that he does: Hi, Victor! I think you're very good, indeed!

If Victor says it, I believe it.
Preach, brother!!

 

[Jazzdogg]

How long does it take to get good?

After sixty years, I retired, just as I was starting to make progress...

 

[Joebone]

comparison is the thief of joy.

Oh, yeah!

 

[BadMonk]

It's about the journey, not the destination.
Take 'your' time and enjoy learning, playing, jamming, whatever.
It's saddening to meet pro level musicians who aren't enjoying music. It very well could be the business of music shining through but saddening nonetheless when talented/accomplished musicians are involved. Sorry for the aside.

 

[Swamp_Ronin]

The world definitely loves absolutes. With music, it's tough to define those absolutes because it's an open-ended art form and discipline beyond a certain scope. It's very easy to get too 'new age' for sure, and I have to check myself on that. Having the benefit of 30 years of playing makes it easy to forget about how bare-bones the struggle to get even the physical strength to play bass well in the first place was. I still find that reminding people that the journey is NEVER done when it comes to musical proficiency is actually important so that people don't get stuck in the clinical end of things too much, and ONLY focus on a clinical 'if this, then that' sort of metric... so they don't beat themselves up when they don't master that scale or that bass part even after the first 5 or 10 times of trying it. Usually, it's after you put the bass down and grab a cup of tea and come back to it that you do nail it. When you've absorbed it so that the execution is second nature.

I do agree with the notion that FOCUSED practice is key. Putting in 6 hours of time just to say you spent 6 hours with the bass in your hands isn't really moving the bar. Some structure is necessary. As a runner, we call those 'junk miles'. Not fast enough to get faster, not hard enough to test your legs and lungs. Sometimes junk miles do more harm than good. 3 fast miles with some strides thrown in can be a better workout than 6 miles. Depends on what you're working on.

The big trap is biting off more than you can reasonably chew for a practice session. Feeling overwhelmed that you aren't doing enough and that you'll never get it all done.

Bill Evans, when asked about his practice regimen, once said that he only practiced 'the minimum'. What he meant was he practiced the minimum amount of MATERIAL - not time. He worked on one tune, or one exercise, until he mastered it, or until it was at a point where he felt like it was 'good enough' to take out of the woodshed onto the gig. Then, it was back to the shed to work on the things that didn't go well in performance. Rushing material into performance that isn't ready yet will likely make you feel like you 'aren't good enough' as a player, when it's the material that isn't ready yet. The journey never ends.

Personally, I got 'good enough' to perform with other musicians within a year or 2 of picking up the instrument - but I was nowhere near where I wanted to be, when I compared my playing to the people I admired at the time - Stefan Lessard of Dave Matthews Band, P-Nut from 311, Marcus Miller, and others. This was before I really went headlong into Jazz and my standards and expectations for myself jumped exponentially. I put in the work to get the fundamentals together to have a sound and be a solid player in terms of time early on. I was playing with a group of fellow high school musicians in an original band, gigging once or twice a month. I learned every time we rehearsed/wrote/performed. But - was I a GOOD bassist or musician yet? Nope. Not even close.

For the first 4-5 years of my musical existence (into college), before I was really out gigging regularly, I spent a ton of time (sometimes 6 hours a day) shedding scales, modes, reading lead sheets, learning melodies, practicing with a metronome, and doing sessions with people to learn how to play together. I was building the foundation. That stuff is absolutely necessary, and THOSE skills are definitely things that you can quantify with a 'good/bad/needs work' sort of metric. That work is essential. But that just makes someone a good clinician and technician - it doesn't mean someone is making music. When you start playing with people and having to reconcile the vocabulary you are building with reacting and creating in the moment - that's the next part of the journey where things get less defined. That's where you start figuring out your voice, your feel, your approach. I have recordings of early college sessions where the quartet I was in was swinging hard. We had good time. We were executing the songs (somewhat), but when I heard my playing, I wasn't speaking the language. I was saying the words, but they weren't mine. I stunk as a soloist. I was listening and playing to survive, not listening to converse and respond.

I think the phrase 'good enough' is possibly too nebulous.... it could honestly be changed to 'what are my standards for myself AND others as a musician'. Being 'good enough' in my personal metric is about constantly raising the floor (and the bar?) for what you accept in your personal performance and accuracy in the situations where you're playing. The 'floor' being the absolute bare bones standard for your worst possible gig/performance. The bar being your absolute best playing where you come away on Cloud 9. Most of us live in the middle. 'Good enough' is always changing. What was 'good enough' when I was 16 or 17 would be absolutely unacceptable now. Shoot, some of the things I played even 15 years ago wouldn't cut it for me now. My floor and bar have moved upward.

The one thing that cannot be rushed, or quantified as easily, is the development of one's ears. Most of that happens by osmosis, and it takes time for your ears to internalize some of the clinical things are are being executed in the practice space. i.e. you can PLAY a certain scale or mode over and over, but your ears need time to really absorb and learn what that sounds like. Eventually, you get to a point where you can hear what's happening even without the instrument in hand. That skill has allowed me to compose/sing ideas for compositions into my phone pretty accurately and then translate them to the instrument once I'm home. I'm still working on unifying my hands with my ears though.

When I and others talk about 'being on a journey', it's more clinically about taking stock of how you feel about your playing, how others feel about your playing, and how you can objectively look at/listen to a performance of yourself and say 'yeah.... we sounded great there. I flubbed that, but I know what I messed up. I'll work on it.' Clinical practice in the shed should ideally become supplemented by evaluation of yourself individually and collectively in a rehearsal or performance. Recording yourself is CRITICAL in all phases. If something isn't getting better, you know what you need to really work on.

Pat Metheny shared once that his 'practice routine' after 50-60 years revolves less around sitting down and running scales, and more about playing actual music and dealing with things he needs to refine along the way. That way, it's always about applying X skill/concept on a clinical level to the pursuit of making music in the moment.

I knew I reached a key point in my musical proficiency and communication when I could listen passively to recordings of performances and ENJOY them purely as a listener, while still noting areas which needed improvement. Eventually you become your own teacher.

This is so good. I’m so glad you are on this forum. You said what I was trying to say, but much better.

 

[JazznFunk]

This is so good. I’m so glad you are on this forum. You said what I was trying to say, but much better.

Gracias.

 

[Jens Telemark]

I’m unlikely to ever think I’ve arrived at being “good".
You’ll know when other people think you are though because you won’t have to play with crappy drummers anymore.

 

[BassicJazzy]

I’m unlikely to ever think I’ve arrived at being “good".
You’ll know when other people think you are though because you won’t have to play with crappy drummers anymore.

I don't think you ever arrive at that, it's not a destination. Suckville, on the other hand, is a place I have spent a lot of time at, in my early years. Rent there is cheap there but I didn't like my neighbors.

 

[bwildt]

Does good mean adequate, solid, or exceptional?

 

[iqi616]

For those of us with ADHD, the best way to achieve the fastest possible progress, is an established end goal with no set time frame but broken down into short achievable segments. Keep your work short and focused.
DB

agreed. I came here to say this but you captured it in a nutshell. I have clear goals but no due date. I call the segments "Inchstones".

I find this approach helps with the overwhelming amount of material on YouTube etc. I focus on content that aligns with my next inchstone towards a goal. I might watch more advanced stuff but only to help me identify the necessary inchstones.

 

[brianrost]

Good is relative. I listen to a lot of players on the local circuit as well as TB members like the Dr. and all I hear is stuff they can do that I can’t. On the other hand, I’ve been working in bands with both full time pros and part timers for four decades and never been fired.

Just last week, a guitarist/BL who I did one sub gig with (my brother is his drummer) heard me at a jam session and when I got off stage he was raving about a two chorus solo I took. I don’t even remember what the song was, I think it was a jump blues. He said he was standing with his regular bassist listening and his guy told him he couldn’t have played my solo, he had no idea how. So in their eyes, I’m good. I think of it as I’m good enough.

How long did it take? Including the four years I was in the Army when I bought my fist bass but was too stupid to seek out other GIs to play with it was six years before my first gig in 1980 following two years of playing blues and bluegrass with others. During that time I had about six months of lessons. My teacher was a guitarist and at the end of my last lesson he told me he had taught me all he knew about bass. If I had hooked up with other players right away, I could have been out gigging in two years. Four years later I was playing alongside pros and two years later I was playing on albums with them.

I started lessons again in the 90s when I started taking the DB seriously and I studied on and off for over a decade, focusing on specific things when I was having trouble playing on gigs…rhythm, articulation, muting, and walking lines.

 

[Dr. Cheese]

The world definitely loves absolutes. With music, it's tough to define those absolutes because it's an open-ended art form and discipline beyond a certain scope. It's very easy to get too 'new age' for sure, and I have to check myself on that. Having the benefit of 30 years of playing makes it easy to forget about how bare-bones the struggle to get even the physical strength to play bass well in the first place was. I still find that reminding people that the journey is NEVER done when it comes to musical proficiency is actually important so that people don't get stuck in the clinical end of things too much, and ONLY focus on a clinical 'if this, then that' sort of metric... so they don't beat themselves up when they don't master that scale or that bass part even after the first 5 or 10 times of trying it. Usually, it's after you put the bass down and grab a cup of tea and come back to it that you do nail it. When you've absorbed it so that the execution is second nature.

I do agree with the notion that FOCUSED practice is key. Putting in 6 hours of time just to say you spent 6 hours with the bass in your hands isn't really moving the bar. Some structure is necessary. As a runner, we call those 'junk miles'. Not fast enough to get faster, not hard enough to test your legs and lungs. Sometimes junk miles do more harm than good. 3 fast miles with some strides thrown in can be a better workout than 6 miles. Depends on what you're working on.

The big trap is biting off more than you can reasonably chew for a practice session. Feeling overwhelmed that you aren't doing enough and that you'll never get it all done.

Bill Evans, when asked about his practice regimen, once said that he only practiced 'the minimum'. What he meant was he practiced the minimum amount of MATERIAL - not time. He worked on one tune, or one exercise, until he mastered it, or until it was at a point where he felt like it was 'good enough' to take out of the woodshed onto the gig. Then, it was back to the shed to work on the things that didn't go well in performance. Rushing material into performance that isn't ready yet will likely make you feel like you 'aren't good enough' as a player, when it's the material that isn't ready yet. The journey never ends.

Personally, I got 'good enough' to perform with other musicians within a year or 2 of picking up the instrument - but I was nowhere near where I wanted to be, when I compared my playing to the people I admired at the time - Stefan Lessard of Dave Matthews Band, P-Nut from 311, Marcus Miller, and others. This was before I really went headlong into Jazz and my standards and expectations for myself jumped exponentially. I put in the work to get the fundamentals together to have a sound and be a solid player in terms of time early on. I was playing with a group of fellow high school musicians in an original band, gigging once or twice a month. I learned every time we rehearsed/wrote/performed. But - was I a GOOD bassist or musician yet? Nope. Not even close.

For the first 4-5 years of my musical existence (into college), before I was really out gigging regularly, I spent a ton of time (sometimes 6 hours a day) shedding scales, modes, reading lead sheets, learning melodies, practicing with a metronome, and doing sessions with people to learn how to play together. I was building the foundation. That stuff is absolutely necessary, and THOSE skills are definitely things that you can quantify with a 'good/bad/needs work' sort of metric. That work is essential. But that just makes someone a good clinician and technician - it doesn't mean someone is making music. When you start playing with people and having to reconcile the vocabulary you are building with reacting and creating in the moment - that's the next part of the journey where things get less defined. That's where you start figuring out your voice, your feel, your approach. I have recordings of early college sessions where the quartet I was in was swinging hard. We had good time. We were executing the songs (somewhat), but when I heard my playing, I wasn't speaking the language. I was saying the words, but they weren't mine. I stunk as a soloist. I was listening and playing to survive, not listening to converse and respond.

I think the phrase 'good enough' is possibly too nebulous.... it could honestly be changed to 'what are my standards for myself AND others as a musician'. Being 'good enough' in my personal metric is about constantly raising the floor (and the bar?) for what you accept in your personal performance and accuracy in the situations where you're playing. The 'floor' being the absolute bare bones standard for your worst possible gig/performance. The bar being your absolute best playing where you come away on Cloud 9. Most of us live in the middle. 'Good enough' is always changing. What was 'good enough' when I was 16 or 17 would be absolutely unacceptable now. Shoot, some of the things I played even 15 years ago wouldn't cut it for me now. My floor and bar have moved upward.

The one thing that cannot be rushed, or quantified as easily, is the development of one's ears. Most of that happens by osmosis, and it takes time for your ears to internalize some of the clinical things are are being executed in the practice space. i.e. you can PLAY a certain scale or mode over and over, but your ears need time to really absorb and learn what that sounds like. Eventually, you get to a point where you can hear what's happening even without the instrument in hand. That skill has allowed me to compose/sing ideas for compositions into my phone pretty accurately and then translate them to the instrument once I'm home. I'm still working on unifying my hands with my ears though.

When I and others talk about 'being on a journey', it's more clinically about taking stock of how you feel about your playing, how others feel about your playing, and how you can objectively look at/listen to a performance of yourself and say 'yeah.... we sounded great there. I flubbed that, but I know what I messed up. I'll work on it.' Clinical practice in the shed should ideally become supplemented by evaluation of yourself individually and collectively in a rehearsal or performance. Recording yourself is CRITICAL in all phases. If something isn't getting better, you know what you need to really work on.

Pat Metheny shared once that his 'practice routine' after 50-60 years revolves less around sitting down and running scales, and more about playing actual music and dealing with things he needs to refine along the way. That way, it's always about applying X skill/concept on a clinical level to the pursuit of making music in the moment.

I knew I reached a key point in my musical proficiency and communication when I could listen passively to recordings of performances and ENJOY them purely as a listener, while still noting areas which needed improvement. Eventually you become your own teacher.

You need to write a book on the topic.

 

[PNW Tony]

The world definitely loves absolutes. With music, it's tough to define those absolutes because it's an open-ended art form and discipline beyond a certain scope. It's very easy to get too 'new age' for sure, and I have to check myself on that. Having the benefit of 30 years of playing makes it easy to forget about how bare-bones the struggle to get even the physical strength to play bass well in the first place was. I still find that reminding people that the journey is NEVER done when it comes to musical proficiency is actually important so that people don't get stuck in the clinical end of things too much, and ONLY focus on a clinical 'if this, then that' sort of metric... so they don't beat themselves up when they don't master that scale or that bass part even after the first 5 or 10 times of trying it. Usually, it's after you put the bass down and grab a cup of tea and come back to it that you do nail it. When you've absorbed it so that the execution is second nature.

I do agree with the notion that FOCUSED practice is key. Putting in 6 hours of time just to say you spent 6 hours with the bass in your hands isn't really moving the bar. Some structure is necessary. As a runner, we call those 'junk miles'. Not fast enough to get faster, not hard enough to test your legs and lungs. Sometimes junk miles do more harm than good. 3 fast miles with some strides thrown in can be a better workout than 6 miles. Depends on what you're working on.

The big trap is biting off more than you can reasonably chew for a practice session. Feeling overwhelmed that you aren't doing enough and that you'll never get it all done.

Bill Evans, when asked about his practice regimen, once said that he only practiced 'the minimum'. What he meant was he practiced the minimum amount of MATERIAL - not time. He worked on one tune, or one exercise, until he mastered it, or until it was at a point where he felt like it was 'good enough' to take out of the woodshed onto the gig. Then, it was back to the shed to work on the things that didn't go well in performance. Rushing material into performance that isn't ready yet will likely make you feel like you 'aren't good enough' as a player, when it's the material that isn't ready yet. The journey never ends.

Personally, I got 'good enough' to perform with other musicians within a year or 2 of picking up the instrument - but I was nowhere near where I wanted to be, when I compared my playing to the people I admired at the time - Stefan Lessard of Dave Matthews Band, P-Nut from 311, Marcus Miller, and others. This was before I really went headlong into Jazz and my standards and expectations for myself jumped exponentially. I put in the work to get the fundamentals together to have a sound and be a solid player in terms of time early on. I was playing with a group of fellow high school musicians in an original band, gigging once or twice a month. I learned every time we rehearsed/wrote/performed. But - was I a GOOD bassist or musician yet? Nope. Not even close.

For the first 4-5 years of my musical existence (into college), before I was really out gigging regularly, I spent a ton of time (sometimes 6 hours a day) shedding scales, modes, reading lead sheets, learning melodies, practicing with a metronome, and doing sessions with people to learn how to play together. I was building the foundation. That stuff is absolutely necessary, and THOSE skills are definitely things that you can quantify with a 'good/bad/needs work' sort of metric. That work is essential. But that just makes someone a good clinician and technician - it doesn't mean someone is making music. When you start playing with people and having to reconcile the vocabulary you are building with reacting and creating in the moment - that's the next part of the journey where things get less defined. That's where you start figuring out your voice, your feel, your approach. I have recordings of early college sessions where the quartet I was in was swinging hard. We had good time. We were executing the songs (somewhat), but when I heard my playing, I wasn't speaking the language. I was saying the words, but they weren't mine. I stunk as a soloist. I was listening and playing to survive, not listening to converse and respond.

I think the phrase 'good enough' is possibly too nebulous.... it could honestly be changed to 'what are my standards for myself AND others as a musician'. Being 'good enough' in my personal metric is about constantly raising the floor (and the bar?) for what you accept in your personal performance and accuracy in the situations where you're playing. The 'floor' being the absolute bare bones standard for your worst possible gig/performance. The bar being your absolute best playing where you come away on Cloud 9. Most of us live in the middle. 'Good enough' is always changing. What was 'good enough' when I was 16 or 17 would be absolutely unacceptable now. Shoot, some of the things I played even 15 years ago wouldn't cut it for me now. My floor and bar have moved upward.

The one thing that cannot be rushed, or quantified as easily, is the development of one's ears. Most of that happens by osmosis, and it takes time for your ears to internalize some of the clinical things are are being executed in the practice space. i.e. you can PLAY a certain scale or mode over and over, but your ears need time to really absorb and learn what that sounds like. Eventually, you get to a point where you can hear what's happening even without the instrument in hand. That skill has allowed me to compose/sing ideas for compositions into my phone pretty accurately and then translate them to the instrument once I'm home. I'm still working on unifying my hands with my ears though.

When I and others talk about 'being on a journey', it's more clinically about taking stock of how you feel about your playing, how others feel about your playing, and how you can objectively look at/listen to a performance of yourself and say 'yeah.... we sounded great there. I flubbed that, but I know what I messed up. I'll work on it.' Clinical practice in the shed should ideally become supplemented by evaluation of yourself individually and collectively in a rehearsal or performance. Recording yourself is CRITICAL in all phases. If something isn't getting better, you know what you need to really work on.

Pat Metheny shared once that his 'practice routine' after 50-60 years revolves less around sitting down and running scales, and more about playing actual music and dealing with things he needs to refine along the way. That way, it's always about applying X skill/concept on a clinical level to the pursuit of making music in the moment.

I knew I reached a key point in my musical proficiency and communication when I could listen passively to recordings of performances and ENJOY them purely as a listener, while still noting areas which needed improvement. Eventually you become your own teacher.

There are a lot of interesting and useful responses on this thread. Yours is profoundly conclusive. Thank you for taking the time to put it together.

 

[JazznFunk]

You need to write a book on the topic.

It'd be a short book! haha. I appreciate the kind words.

 

[Dr. Cheese]

Good Advice

 

[Prodigus Filius]

10,000 hours. Isn't that the magic number?
I got a ways to go.

10000 years in my case he he