Well here we are again. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I decided to dedicate way way way too much time to learning a Jackson 5 song for my 1 year Bassiversary.
2 years ago, I watched a French house music producer play a bass line to one of his tracks live at an event. It seemed impossibly cool and out of reach. Music seemed like some kind of magic to me and it was probably too late to give it a try.
But now that riff is super straight forward. So how did we get here? Well a combination of a few things:
- @JoshFossgreen’s excellent course which set me up for success. I’m still so very grateful for that.
- Learning songs has been and continues to be the best thing to improve my playing. By learning songs I don’t mean learning riffs. Learning the whole song front to back. Chord changes, walk ups, walk downs, fills, counting, dynamics etc and then when I’ve got it down, recording myself to use as a yardstick to see my development.
We tend to be quite short sighted as humans and it’s easy to forget how far we’ve actually come. We fixate on the thing we can’t do and re watching a year old cover is a good reminder that maybe our timing has slightly improved. - Using a drum machine (Beat Buddy) to practice has really improved my internal sense of time. It’s pretty much always on for all my practice sessions.
- This is still the nicest forum on the internet.
- Putting in the work. My conservative estimate is, over 1000 hours of playing bass in 24 months. I’m lucky, as I have no other commitments but if you want to suck less, then the only way out of that place is playing more bass. Buying more stuff (as cool as that is) won’t improve your timing!
- Lastly I’m still so very glad I found bass, even this late in life
I’m working on my 2 year bassiversary cover, which hopefully I’ll get done over the weekend.
If you haven’t already done it check out the best thread on this forum to see fellow bass buzzers like yourself making music.
Cheers Amigos
