Jamplay
Jamplay doesn’t seemed to have been mentioned much on here except to be quickly dismissed. I agree 100% B2B is a much better place to start by a mile, but as an after bassbuzz thing I have found it valuable. Can’t remember $ to join, but I joined when they had some sale and cost was reasonable. There is a lot of stuff to wade through in there so I have just scratched the surface over the last month or so, but here is a couple of things I found:
I want to improve my groove/‘pocket playing’ so I tried:
30 Rock Bass Grooves for Beginners You Must Know
The lessons are similar to the last lesson of most B2B modules where you learn a recognisable song riff.
Andrew Ford is the tutor; he has a nice laid back delivery style and throws in good tips each lesson.
Each lesson Andrew plays riff (normal speed), then breaks down the riff note by note, and then a slow speed play through. You can then refer to a pdf, and play to/download an mp3 instrumental loop (full speed with no bass).
They vary in complexity and can be 2,4, or 8 bars long, with a mix of 8th, 16ths, triplets, walkups, chugging etc.
They are ‘in the style of’ rather than exact riffs from songs. This could be annoying if you wanted to go on to learn the actual songs, but as riffs I find them close enough to be fun (grooves also have punny ‘in the style of’ names, could be a plus or minus depending on sense of humor)
Its good having a growing set of new riffs I can play on loop working on ‘groove’ stuff (that I would normally not have concentration space for).
I recently posted me practicing a couple of these grooves which gives an idea
I also have done the Beginner Bass With Billy Sheehan course.
It is in no way a comprehensive course like B2B (there is maybe an hour of video in total), it is really barely a primer.
But if you treated it like ‘an hour with Billy Sheehan’ for beginners and watched all of it at once it would probably work pretty well, as he has some really good ‘words of wisdom’ sprinkled through out.
I also liked one of the practice riffs he showed and pretty much use it every warmup (pdf was available with course of this).
[side note: in this course Billy has his bass tuned down half a step (but talks notes on the fretboard as if its not) which seemed to really piss off people who play along as they watch, further reason to make this mostly a watching course IMO]