Let me begin with my bona fides - I’ve been teaching electric bass for over 20 years now.
I am a professional bass teacher!
This is a giant alarm bell.
I agree with lots of the other comments on this post, and this method of teaching is a method from people who can play, but don’t understand how to teach, and certainly don’t understand how to teach different levels and different ages and different styles of learning.
You are NOT supposed to be able to do what he’s doing.
For all of my older students - meaning students who are post-college, later 20s on up - if they have never played before, the beginning of instruction has everything to do with listening and the need to be able to hear how a song works and - more specifically - what the bass is and what it is doing.
This can take months and months.
You have to consider this - for your entire musical life your ears (and everyone else’s ears save for bass players) have been trained to follow (in this order:)
- the vocals and lyrics
- any other higher frequency melody line / solo / musical theme
- Drums
Bass never factors into it! No one grows up learning to pick out bass lines.
It is a very difficult skill to develop, particularly when you’re coming to the bass later in life and your ears and brain have developed deep grooves for how they process listening to music.
It’s hard!!
I recommend a different teacher, or maybe waiting on a teacher until you’ve worked through the B2B program a bit further.
Finding a patient and wise bass teacher is hard and rare. Most of them are people who learned to play, were skilled, are young, and don’t have the experience or patience to know how to teach to anyone who isn’t on the track they themselves took to learn bass - i.e. - it came pretty easy, and they started young.
Music is a language, and playing music means being able to communicate in a very specific dialect. B2B will really help you learn the basics, and will help you learn to hear into music to find our special bass language hidden in the layers and layers of vocals and melodies.
Sorry that you had the experience of an inexperienced and unwise teacher reflecting their inadequacies on you.
That’s terrible.