Looking for book of Christmas MELODIES for bass guitar written in NOTATION, not tab…any suggestions?
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I looked high and low (bass clef low) for this and no dice. Sadly.
The only thing that i say is get a book (or real book) and transpose yourself, which I’ve been doing with a few tunes this month.
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If you’re looking for the melodies - not the bass lines or harmonies, but the melodies - I wouldn’t even bother looking for a bass score. Though you might be able to buy one, I bet the selection is really sparse. Could be wrong though.
I’d just buy a piano score and learn them off the treble clef of the staff, but a couple octaves lower on the bass. You’ll have to learn to read the treble clef, but that’s good for you, long term. Not for bass but for other instruments.
Or you could transpose them down and re-notate on the bass clef, but probably easier to just learn the full grand staff.
You could also buy a score for another instrument but you would need to be careful about concert pitch. This would be easier in some ways (no chords) but harder in others (might be transposed to some weird transposition, might not be the melody, the other instrument might be scored for an accompaniement.)
Note: this trick with piano scores will work with melodies but not basslines. The left hand of a piano piece is usually going to be a completely different arrangement than the bassline. But the right hand will be playing the melody, for the most part.
You’ll have to figure out what to do with the chords - which note(s) you want to play from them.
The Real Books are best for this… Treble clef, melody lyrics and chords only, straight, no embellishments etc like on piano. Transposing C treble to C bass clef is not too hard at all.
I was going to nab this one and do it, but already have it in Bb and Eb for sax, and figure I could just transpose those, albeit harder as its a two step transposition.
I am really interested in playing the melody on bass and the bass line on bari sax.
But that is a TON of transposing and I have not gotten to it yet.
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Get a book of xmas songs for piano (I have a few of them), and create your own bassline based on a combination of the melody on the treble clef, the piano bass part on the bass clef (one octave higher), and the chords. It’s amazing what you can come up with, it’s also lot of fun.
I haven’t seen any bass scores for xmas songs out there, so you pretty much have to create your own.
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Ahh yeah, that sounds perfect.
Add to that there is an iReal app that has chord charts and drum/chord backing tracks for every song in all the books so you have a backing track at your disposal for all of it to play along with, and can vary speed etc.
If I only didn’t have to work…sigh
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Reading the treble clef is easy, by the way. Just as easy as the bass clef. Or even easier, because instead of remembering ACE-G, all you need to remember is FACE 
That’s totally enough to get you started. And is how most people do get started with it in my experience. It’s nicer than the “every good boy…” mnemonic because it’s only four things to remember at worst and in reality is one thing to remember really, because who forgets FACE 
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I just read treble by mentally moving every note I see down two lines… IE: knowing the bottom line is G on the bass clef, when I see a note on the bottom line of the treble clef, my mind immediately translates it to an E. It takes some practice to be able to do this efficiently, but it’s worth the effort, especially if you also play instruments that use the treble clef.
Playing piano from the Grand Staff is what forced me to learn that technique, because I have to read from both treble and bass clefs simultaneously. It’s been quite a few decades since I took a piano lesson, so I don’t recall how the piano teachers teach it, but this method works for me. As always, YMMV 
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That’s because you learned the bass clef first (or are the most familiar with it). Most people are the opposite (or learned them at the same time). There’s only a few instruments that exclusively use the bass clef; we happen to play one
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This is true, and for those people, they can use a similar technique for learning the bass clef, only in the opposite direction
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I was afraid I would have issues with treble once I re-learned bass clef (knew it poorly for a while when I had a sousaphone to play around with) but it appears to have only enhanced my treble clef reading by, well, just reading more music in general. Mark Smith’s course helped both clef’s in the end.
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Anything wrong with these?
I realize that tab is included with the standard notation, but you can cover it up if that bothers you… Or start to learn the song by copying the score into MuseScore. 
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This ‘sister book’ to the one above has ‘better’ tunes. The one with the red bass on the cover has more super traditional tunes.
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That second one looks like what he was looking for, yeah. Good find.
When I look at the sample pages, I’m not sure I agree. It’s the same rhythmic notation as the treble clef, so what makes it the bass line,(other than it’s for bass which is the point)?
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Bass clef still spells FACE if you start under the first line 
when I was young, I played violin for 4 years and then played bassoon and trombone for the next 5. Other than a little trumpet while I played trombone (which was over thirty years ago) and a little piano about 5 years ago, I have not made any effort to read treble clef at all and I can still read treble clef much better than bass clef 
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True! But I like to remember Ace-G as it sounds like a cool DJ name 
Treble clef can be dogface if you include the D too!
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There is a Bass cleff version of this book also.
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