I’m going back through B2B again and hit Billie Jean again today. For reference: I first started playing bass (as in, never held one before) 36 days ago. I finished the B2B one month plan but have restarted it again straight away so I can nail all the workouts and not have flying fingers.
29 days ago (I kept a log!) was when I was doing the Billie module and I couldn’t imagine being able to do the slow workout. But today I managed the slow workout with barely any effort, and after about four passes of the medium workout, I was able to do that too. Not always very well, but well enough to feel confident I’ll fully nail the medium workout tomorrow (my hands are freezing now so I had to stop practice).
B2B and @JoshFossgreen 's instruction are awesome. So if you’re struggling with the Billie lesson or the slow workout, don’t stress about it because you WILL get it. I’m incorporating it in my practice as a reminder of my progress.
Is not worry about this as a goal, fingers fly for a long long time and there’s a lot more fun things to do and learn. It comes with time. One day you will look down and another finger or two will be behaving and so in etc. be conscious if it, but I would warn against making this a short term goal.
You are making great progress. The same thing happened to me. I was really struggling with Billie Jean, walked away from it for a while, then came back and the slow workout finally clicked with my fingers. Then lots of repetition and I could finally do the fast workout.
Flying fingers are tamable with some dedicated practice.
Simple one-finger-per-fret playing on a single string very slowly, being mindful to keep fingertips close above the string before and after pressing the string down, works well.
It only takes a couple of minutes of mindful practicing this exercise a day to get the process going. It will still take time and effort to tame flying fingers, but not as long as it would take without it.
When I first tried it I couldn’t play the slow version. As many people recommend I continued with the course and used it as a warm up. I can now play it at the medium speed.
The wicked mistress has her own lover in the fast workout for Higher and Higher (module 8 lesson 2). Billie in the fast workout is easier for me than this!
Madam BJ has been giving me a torrid time this week and I’ve been stuck on that lesson since Sunday. I can play it at my own pace (about 6 bpm) but that’s about it. What’s really annoyed me is that I learned the basics to “Urgent” and “Guns of Brixton” in about ten minutes each yet I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my fingers around Billie Jean.
I have two weeks off work from tomorrow night, so if I can’t master the slow workout over this weekend, I’m drop kicking it and will return after a few more modules.
Thank you @peterhuppertz for the post giving the advice on the metronome and thank you @eric.kiser for re-posting it here.
Hopefully I won’t offend anyone by saying this, but I don’t think the lesson “Billy Jean” is really that bad. What I see a lot of is people rushing through each lesson “as do I” because they are excited about learning how to play bass. I don’t think anyone should rush to finish this course. In my opinion doing it in one month is kind of unreasonable. I mean if you have I have a question for you. Did you retain each lesson physically? Did you practice each one over and over until it came naturally? If not then what happened is once you reached Billy Jean lesson the skills you should have had by now weren’t developed. I’m finding it easy because of my classical guitar background. Another thing, the tabs are intimidating. At least they look that way. What I suggest is watching Josh teach that lesson slowly and learn maybe two movements at a time. Do them over and over, then move on to the next two. Soon you’ll have the entire lesson. But don’t stop there continue to practice even after moving on to next lesson. Just my two cents. Don’t get discouraged.
Haven’t made it to this part of the course yet, but I found some tabs for this song online, and after reading this thread it seems like there are a couple different ways to play it but the tabs I originally learned on were like this:
It sounds right to me, but after seeing the octave video above I feel like I should relearn the damn thing, or just wait til I make it to the lesson and see how Josh teaches it. However you play it, if it sounds funky and has that sweet groove we all know so well then I’d say go with what works for you!
