I've been working with these a couple of weeks now, maybe 1/2 to 1 hour each day.
I think there are a lot of great exercises and basslines that are really fun to learn and play. They are really forcing me to learn to read and I'm making good progress there. What I want to get to is to have no mental translation between the note on the staff and where my fingers go. This is working for some notes but others I have to think about. With a little more work I think I'll get pretty far along in that area though.
There are a few issues with the books, or maybe a few things I would change.
1) The two I've used so far really needed a solid round of editing and review before publication. The Entry Level book seems to be a little worse than what I call "Book 1" (Finger Funk Bass). A lot of the chord markings are missing - like part of a song has them and part of it doesn't. This is basic stuff editing would pick up.
2) Hints about where to play some notes would be very helpful. You can figure some out for yourself, and I've started adding my own markings when I need to play some notes up or down the board to prep for what comes next. Just seems like these books would benefit a lot by very small amount of notes and guidance on how to play.
3) I am a little annoyed by the missing gratuitous accidentals, as I call them. I mean the ones that are often included at the start of a measure to remind you of an accidental specified by the key that was marked neutral in the previous measure. I'm adding them myself, but to play in a sight reading scenario these are just nice to have.
4) My experience with bass guitar annotation is weak (I'm just learning now) but I think some amount of marks for hammer-on, pull-off and other type of non-fingered notes would be nice and helpful. Again, I'm penciling these in myself, but to have included some of these would have made the books more complete. I
5) There are some note errors. Maybe there were errata pages in the forum that is now shut down. This is another editing problem that could have been fixed, though it would likely require an independent reader who would also listen to the recordings. I've had to add a replacement measure with a sticky note in one place since the correction couldn't be written.
So overall these are fun books and I'm learning a lot, especially reading bass clef and learning the fingerboard. I think they could have been much better learning resource with just a little more editing effort, details, and directions to the player. It would be awesome to see a second release with these kind of changes, but sadly that seems very unlikely now.
