Oh, I don’t have all that knowledge down very well. Just saying where I have been able to apply it it has been helpful, but the sight reading I just haven’t done. Before learning more theory I had to noodle around to do my bass lines in my band. Would just kind of follow the first note the guitarist played or make my own thing that my ear told me was good. You can get by without theory fine. At the same time when I finally stopped resisting learning it, I found it surprisingly useful. But still don’t sight read
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You’re way ahead of me 
Sing and play and 40 songs is awesome! As far as playing with others, you can do it without theory for sure. A majority of my bands album was songs before I started really dabbling in theory, just knew a few shapes and where notes were on fretboard.
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Ok, after defending tabs, I will admit that this is the absolute last thing I want:
Nice work Songsterr. Yes, you’re seeing that right. That’s the keyboard part expressed as an EADGBE guitar tab.
I get that they are limited by their own format but this is a stretch, even for me.
To be fair though the same format works awesome for drum tabs.
That’s absolutely perfect, exactly what I want.
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Those triangles help alot. My strength is in memorizing the patterns. I tend to get obsessed with a new song and practice endlessly though. I can see how knowing the notes and scales come into play. As well as being in a band, I’m sure that helps a ton. I’m part of a duo with my bf, he’s noticed a tremendous improvement in my playing since I started B2B. Gotta get back at it! So much more to learn.
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@froghopper01 when I first picked up the bass nearly 2 years ago, I didn’t know how to read music either. Going through the B2B course, I utilized tab as the only way I could put a bunch of tones together. I didn’t start taking my sight reading course until midway through the B2B course, and it helped to propel my development. Toward the end of the B2B course, I was using the music notation that Josh presented in the lessons instead of the tab.
Case in point: After I had finished B2B I had just one thing to finish, and that was Billie Jean (which I had skipped). This time, I played it using the notes instead of tab and I breezed through it. Granted, I came back to her with more experience on the bass, but I truly believe that playing the notes instead of the tab made the difference for me.
The topic of this thread is “Beyond Badass”, and learning sight reading is just something I strongly recommend.
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I’m currently doing 1 on 1 lessons over Skype having finished B2B and played around on my own for a little while. Literally just finished a lesson going over the relationships of major/minor thirds and how you can massively expand on that little bit of knowledge to apply to chord progressions and imrov… It’s tough to fully absorb at first but it’s SUPER interesting 
But yeah, sight reading is essential for understanding the rhythm along with a tab, so using both I can muddle through but yes also takes me a little while 
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It’s just trying to hit a balance, if you can learn sight reading it’s good to do. I think different people click with things differently. Sight reading never clicked for me and still hasn’t, even after understanding it. So I’m not saying don’t learn it, but I am saying if you are just really struggling with it, don’t let it discourage you from going forward in your journey. You can do it AND still be an excellent and functional musician
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That’s it exactly! It’s not that one is better than the other, just different methods of learning. I compared it to driving a stick vs. an automatic. Either one gets you driving the car. Even better if you can learn both. Once I have a song in my muscle memory from hours of practice, I’m no longer looking at anything! Of course the songs I choose to learn are one’s I’ve known for years as a singer. I’m sure it helps being able to hear in your head from memory how it’s supposed to sound.
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I’m sorry, I don’t know why I thought you knew sight reading before learning bass. I was self taught on tabs before I took the plunge on the lessons. I understand the concept now of reading music. It would slow me down quite a bit if I switched over now. I’m glad you found what helps you get beyond B2B. Hours of practice with the skills learned in the B2B course has been what’s propelled my learning.
I think there may be an advantage as far as finding the music vs tabs for a particular song. I think there are less songs available in tab. Sometimes I find what I’m looking for only to rewrite it in a way that works better for me. Kudos to you for learning Billie Jean! That was a challenge wasn’t it? It was like a tongue twister for the fingers.
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It’s very genre-specific. I am having bad luck finding sheet music for most of the music I like, and what I have found has been wrong
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More and more I find myself editing what I find. I have small hands, so I prefer to not jump all over the neck. I will throw in open notes if need be to make the reach of my patterns flow more smoothly. Then I can focus more on getting the timing correct. As I improve, I can later replace the open notes if the fretted note sounds better. But the bad tabs can be perfected to fit the sound you’re going for. Some of them can still be a good starting point. If I see a bunch of notes high on the neck, (ie- A10, I’ll play D5) I immediately change those! Especially since I learn and practice on a short scale bass and those notes don’t sound good. Once I have it down I move on to my full scale.
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Oh yeah I almost always change the fingering of good tabs to suit what I like. I get annoyed at people that avoid open strings when it is a much better choice, too.
But the real problem is tabs and sheet music that are simply incorrect. I find these all the time. I’ve had pretty good luck fixing them and getting changes accepted, but still - it’s annoying.
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I gave up long ago on trying to find decent sheet music. Nowadays, when I want to learn a song, I just get the chord chart from Chordify and create my own bassline from it. So far, I’ve been fairly successful at coming up with something very close to the original bassline.
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Yeah, I’ve done similar things, finding the key and basic chords and learning the bassline by ear. Though tabs and scores do provide useful starting points, even when wrong.
Keyboards are another case though - it’s often hard to discern specific chords and so on. Nice to have music or (in extremis) tabs for that.
These days I am most excited when I find good drum tabs because that makes getting the drums done trivial, like 45 minutes or so to lay down the drum track for a song.
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So are you recording drums to play along with on the bass? I’m not following why you need drum tabs?
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My bandmate and I are having fun doing full covers of songs, from scratch. Usually I do bass, drum programming, keys, and vocals, and he does guitars. Mostly for fun but really to work on music production skills.
Please be kind, I am very new at vocals - only doing it out of necessity
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I wasn’t aware there is even such a thing as drum tab
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Scroll up a bit, I gave an example of one 
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