"Rusty bass player material" - to help refresh

[ED3]

Good Morning,

I've taken a hiatus from bass playing and have been trying to find a good place to 'knock the rust off' and get back into playing how I used to. Any direction would be appreciated in the form of links/youtube channels/ or anything on this forum.

Thank you!

P.S.

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum!

 

[Malcolm35]

Scales first to get your fingers moving. When that is comfortable using some basic bass lines to the active chord progression, you are hearing -- or -- just made up. I bet it is like riding a bike, it comes bask faster than you thought.

Then dig up your old gig book and play some of your old songs.

Good luck.

 

[Kevin Guin]

For a lot of players there's probably nothing better to get your "grip" in shape than playing blues lines and patterns and recording yourself to gauge your progress. Play'em fast, play'em slow. Pentatonics stretch your grip in the best way and if you are playing for 6 or 8 times through you are working on your time as well.

I am assuming you are not going to pull out the Prelude to the 1st Cello Suite/Bach. That is a great thing to learn but you will crack your wrist in three places unless you really take your time and are quite seriously motivated for that type of thing.

If you want to be more academic and try an "exercise" per se, then take a pentatonic scale and play a typical skip-one-come-back-one pattern. The thing about playing ANY pattern on a pentatonic scale is that you end up playing a LOT of fourths and that is very difficult to get used to and very difficult to play cleanly. Try it and you will immediately see what I mean. But what an incredible rock-solid grip you will build!

Here's a lesson I published a few months ago. There are several parts so you could try any or all.

Pentatonics All Over Your Bass

 

[Benjamin Earl]

I usually knock off the rust with practicing the major mode positions. It helps me to focus on playing every note possible in the modes from the nut to the bridge. Play the whole fretboard, not just an 8 note scale box. Once you have a good foundation in fretboard visualization, then start playing grouping of scale tones (3,4,etc) and/or skipping scale tones in patterns of a specific intervals (3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths).