This is certainly true of the church music that I play. Fully written out parts for BG are exceedingly rare and the one or two that I have seen were exceedingly boring. Some of the stuff we do will have DB or Cello parts and they tend to be boring too. Fairly often though the cello part has something interesting but the keyboard players tend to appropriate those bits! The bassists on the practice recordings typically do much more interesting things and while I would love to have some of their lines transcribed so I could study them, the good lines are never, in my experience so far, transcribed. You pick it up by ear the best you can. Mostly I work off the chords, text notes to the bassist on the music, the recordings, and the occasional written out part that rarely exceeds 2 or 3 measures where the composer wants the whole ensemble playing something in unison be it specific notes or often just rhythms. Some of us work in environments where the ability to work off of written parts in whatever form they exist is very helpful or critical and some of us do not. I would not turn down a good tab of an interesting riff it were handed to me!
