Bass ear training

Theory
1

I really want to be able to listen to songs and know what frets to press after a couple of listens but I’ve looked up many ways to train my ear for bass but every time I look I get a website or app and it’s always piano keys. Is there any ear trainer with just bass or another method I can use to help train my ears?

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2

Well there’s an easy way and there’s a hard way.

The easiest is to study the fingerboard, and start your ear training exercise. Learn your basic theories and chords progression. It gets things rolling.

The easy way is to start with easy song, do that a couple of hundred songs (easy) then move up to intermediate then difficult, by the time you get there you’d have it nailed. I’m half way down the intermediate.

The hard way is to play a lots of songs with tab on YouTube and hope you have great retention and hopefully when you play enough songs your muscle memory can get you there.

There’s no shortcuts. You scan learn “A” song and master it but to know all songs takes lots of dedication and hard work. Not even session pro can do it consistently on the fly.

Try this guy

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3

I can’t listen to music and immediately go “that’s an E” and wing it, but with enough time spent playing and listening I can usually get close. You will become familiar with what notes sound like on different strings and it will get easier.

What I do is hook up my bass, play whatever song it is i’m trying to learn, then just fret around until I find the right note. Since you can play the same note in many different places you just have to listen to the progression to dial in where exactly it’s being played on the neck.

1 Like
4

Hi All,

I just purchased badass course. when it comes to ear training. is this cover on this course too? I just want to improve my ear training. as a musician my frustration to cover many songs that I want.

Thanks.

5

I’ve not completed B2B yet but by module 9 I haven’t come across any ear training. It does do into improvisation which is great. Others will be able to confirm whether there’s any ear training later in the course but I suspect not.

Mark Smith at Talking Bass has an Ear Training For Bass Volume 1 – TalkingBass course but I’ve not done it myself so can’t comment. In general Mark’s courses tend to be a little more theory based than Josh’s.

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6

Here’s the thing that I feel worried I purchased that course because of that. I think that is covered. one of my frustration is my ear since I can’t cover many music that I want. I don’t know what effective ways to improve it. I’m not entirely sure whatever skills I can produce after this course.

7

Well playing by ear is just one aspect of playing an instrument. B2B is about playing bass in the whole and there are a host of techniques to master and Josh’s course does a great job of doing that. You may just find that as you learn these techniques you find you ear improving along with them. I’d say that’s the case for me.

But maybe if it is specifically just ear training you’re are looking for you should look at the course I linked above.

1 Like
8

@HighlandBass. Thanks to share about your ideas and also the link you sent.

Probably I’ll try that Ear Training from Mark Smith once I finish B2B course.
Have you tried that already? how was it? Is that worth it to invest?

is that course can cover a whole bunch of materials to learn about Ear Training? Are you able to cover many songs by using that his course?

Thanks sir.

9

From the Talking Bass ear training course description.

What Will I Learn?

After completing level 1 you will have acquired an understanding of the following areas of ear training

  • The ability to recognise and recreate basic melodies and bass lines in the major key
  • Recognition of simple chord qualities
  • Recognition of common chord progressions in a major key
  • A better memory and recall of rhythms over several bars in length
  • Highly improved Transcription skills

How Long Are The Lessons?

The lesson lengths vary but the Level 1 contains over 4 hours of video and many weeks, months and years of practice material.

10

I haven’t done that one but have done a couple of his courses and rate them highly. Very different style to Josh’s but a bit of variety is always a good thing.

11

Chord Tones is great. I’ll defer to Mike’s opinion for Ear Training over it (I have not taken Ear Training) but I will solidly recommend Chord Tones to really land some of the relationships to how chords fit together.