I currently don’t have a practice session outline so I asked, and this is what it produced. What do you think?
Bass Practice Outline (20-30 minutes) for a 1-Year Player:
Warm-up (5 minutes):
Start with a few minutes of stretching and loosening up your fingers, wrists, and arms.
Play open strings or simple scales to warm up your hands and get them ready for playing.
Technique Exercises (5 minutes):
Work on basic finger exercises to improve dexterity and strength.
Practice alternate plucking (down-up) using a metronome to develop consistency and accuracy.
Focus on fretting hand technique, ensuring clean and clear notes by placing fingers close to the frets.
Scales and Arpeggios (5 minutes):
Review major scales and play them in different positions on the fretboard.
Practice playing scales in different rhythmic patterns, emphasizing timing and precision.
Move on to basic arpeggios (major and minor) and practice them in different keys.
Song or Exercise (5 minutes):
Choose a song you’ve been working on or an exercise that challenges your current skill level.
Break down the challenging parts into smaller sections and practice them slowly, gradually increasing the speed.
Pay attention to rhythm, timing, and note accuracy while maintaining a relaxed posture.
Ear Training (5 minutes):
Train your ears by working on simple melodies, either by listening and trying to play them by ear or using ear training apps or exercises.
Focus on recognizing intervals, playing them on your bass, and training your pitch accuracy.
Groove and Rhythm (5 minutes):
Play along to a drumbeat or metronome and focus on developing a solid sense of timing.
Experiment with different rhythmic patterns and play along to various styles of music (e.g., rock, funk, blues).
Pay attention to your groove, feel, and the interaction between the bass and drums.
Cool-down and Reflection (1 minute):
Take a moment to relax and stretch your hands, fingers, and arms again.
Reflect on your practice session and note any areas that need improvement or further attention in future sessions.
Remember, this is just a general outline, and you can adjust the time allocation based on your personal preferences and goals. It’s essential to practice regularly and maintain a positive attitude towards improvement. Enjoy your bass playing journey!
All good stuff, but clearly a bit too ambitious for 20-30 minutes. If you only have 20-30 minutes, pick some of the suggested exercises, and then some others on the next day and so on.
While I am generally opposed to AI and ChatGPT (I’m a software developer who is also a fantasy/sci-fi nerd; there is no scenario where AI ends up good for humanity, LOL), I like the breakdown of the outline. I might start basing my own practice routine around those breakdowns.
I hear you, Tim. I’m mostly just curious about this stuff so I good around when an idea pops.
Funny story. I work software support and needed a perl script that would move files from one folder to another for a customer request. I’m not a developer even a little, and everyone was busy so I got ChatGPT to help. It did it perfectly, well, with a couple tweaks.
We’ve been warned about using Al in the office for work stuff, just that we don’t want our property pushed to the web. This one was a one-off and was very generic.
Anyway, of course I’d not wish for anyone to lose their job to AI, but becoming proficient in it may be helpful.
It did come up with some good exercises and I’ve already started using it for practice. Just longer sessions of each step.
Interesting, as are the many responses. Given that practising is mostly about acquiring new skills and /or knowledge. This practise routine isn’t a bad first stab. I’m sure you could easily come up with something that more suits you though? Don’t waste too much time on warm ups. If you choose warm up exercises that also have a harmonic, or technique based element, they will serve you well. Get stuck straight into what you want to learn and don’t spend too much time on any one thing i.e. it only takes a few seconds to play a scale, so once you know the fingering and can play is successfully anything after that is just finger exercise, not learning. You may as well move on to the next thing you want to work on.
Well if it is any consolation, the large language models are not really AI per se in that there is no cognition or intelligence there, just a very very nice UI for regurgitation. Think of them as great search engines for popular opinion weighted topics. Which still makes them very dangerous, just not SkyNet style.
I do feel like today’s Twitter nonsense (requiring login now? LOL RIP) coupled with Reddit starting to implode - these things can only be good for AI chatbot accuracy. Those two sites alone account for probably 60% of the bullshit on the internet. If we could get Facebook to take a dirtnap too, it might just save humanity.
As an old-school AI person from the 80’s and 90’s, your opinion warms the cockles of my grumpy-old-man heart. I have a department full of youngsters who think what they do is AI .
Now that’s amazing. Even lawyers are using LLM’s to cheat.
A lot of the application of what the kids today call AI in audio is pretty amazing though. Like, it’s probably going to render audio evidence in legal cases inadmissible. Seriously, ElevenLabs will probably have to do some serious explaining in court in the future about how their software was able to deepfake audio so well.
Scammers are even using AI-generated voices for petty crimes. There was this case last week where a son called his mom asking for money. It failed because the son just walked into the room where she was calling. I’m already educating my parents on cybercrimes
The ElevenLabs stuff is crazy. When you can listen to something totally NSFW, search youtube for “Luke, did I ever tell you about Ahsoka Tano?” - someone took the old Aristocrats-like joke from 4chan and did it perfectly using ElevenLabs. It sounds exactly like Sir Alec Guinness .
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