I finished the Bass Buzz course a few months back, I practice everyday, including scales, noodling, and songs, and I am now playing on my church’s worship team. I have gone back and reviewed a few courses from Bass Buzz, especially the copy and paste part. I feel confident when I sit down at church to play and follow the Nashville number system. I want to progress now and be able to confidently sit down at a jam session or when they ask me to give them a bass line I can. I want playing to be enjoyable and I don’t want the band to wait on me. I can play root, root fifth, and root fifth octave just fine. I want to improvise with more passing notes and just be able to jam. For church, we only practice an hour before service and I usually do not have the songs until the night before.
My question is, what is my next step to getting better and to be that bass player that people want to jam with or to be able to fill in? Bass Buzz had a great structure and I kind of feel lost trying to learn without structure. Do I learn just by playing more,should I take a more in depth online course, should I take in person lessons at GC from a guitarist who says he can play bass? lol. I am about two hours north of Seattle, near Bellingham, WA if someone knows someone. Thank you everyone in advance. This bass journey has been amazing. I am currently on vacation in Idaho and of course my bass came with me. lol
Sir Paul McCartney still claims to be a guitarist who also plays bass. When I was taking in person lessons, playing with someone else was the best part.
If you want to get better, play with others. That will level you up more than anything.
The best advice is to find people to play with. There is no real substitute for that. Call it experience, or chops. See if someone in the church group likes to jam. Go to a live jam session (not open mic). Join a band.
Play your scales to a metronome, you will see immediate improvement. Focus on being on time and and accurately fretting NOT SPEED. 90 bpm is a good start, slow down if you’re consistently missing. Build up speed slowly. This is my warmup before every practice. If you want more info on my warm up, let me know, its a lot to type.
Learn triads, arpegios and Pentatonic scales in both minor and major. They are a good way to make your basslines move and how you move across the strings.
Pentatonic Boxes are how you move up and down the neck. You could be a serviceable bassist and never learn the Pentatonic boxes but if you have aspirations of being a shredder, you’ll need the boxes.
If you know you’ll be called on to play worship music on some Sundays (and if, hopefully, you like the music) a great practice would be to just find songs that you might be asked to play, and try and learn them.
I’m sure you’d be able to find the chord charts or tabs if needed, but a great practice would be listening to the music you’ll be playing and trying to learn the recorded bass parts.
I’m sure you’d find a bunch of cool things to put in your bass tool kit, and then those time-crunched days of getting music and rehearsing would be a lot easier.
Otherwise…
There’s a heap of great articles here that someone I know wrote (it was me), and some of them are even helpful!
The pentatonics article (as @fishmongerjoe was talking pentatonics too) is a great next step to find things to practice:
Starting with Berry Oakley and George Porter Jr is sick (two of my favorites). Thanks for sharing such an informative and comprehensive article. That was surely a lot of work.
The Meters may be the most underrated band in the history of the universe.
What I’ve been trying to do is build my own music. Either from backing tracks or just drum beats. I find it helps me think about what is being played and how can I contribute to the piece. I don’t have anyone to jam with but I also want to be able to make my own music so I don’t see it as settling for a lesser option.
I’m also starting to listen to videos that analyse parts of songs to help me with understanding.
I suggest the 50 Songs Challenge. It’s an additional benefit of the course. And if you post your video online, you’ll get feedback from dozens of bassists who have gone through the course. I’m convinced you can’t get this kind of feedback anywhere else and it’s a hidden gem.