I’ve actually found that I can do the course better after playing some songs in Yousician. It gives me more confidence when it comes to switching my fingers on the fretboard. After playing Highway to Hell, I did part of my latest module and found that I could follow along with @JoshFossgreen much better than when I tried it straight into the lesson.
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This was my experience. We played three songs a semester, every year; new semesters were kind of exciting as we wondered songs they would bring. Almost nobody made their own music (that I know of, anyway). We either practiced the music we had, or practiced scales. The band directors would even give us sheet music if we asked for it. We would even figure out how to play metal songs as a small group lol. I’ve read stories of big classical musicians even commissioning music to be written for them to play.
Not many really wrote their own stuff that I know of. Wanting to write songs seems like a very “guitar” thing to do.
…Really? That is the opposite of my experience. We practiced scales all the time and were given all kinds of exercises to play. We had contests that we went to and performed at, as well as concerts each semester. We did sight-reading contests that would have been mostly impossible without knowing theory. You recognized scales, patterns, key signatures, or even hidden key signatures because of accidentals being a thing, etc.
But that was also in a music education program in a school district setting. I imagine after a certain level, you’re just expected to know how to play your instrument and play the given material.
We were kind of a mixed bag. We were taught all that stuff and expected to know and practice it, but the theory did not go much deeper than scales and intervals. In the end our job was to learn our parts and show up.
I never practiced and I was still consistently second or third chair, out of maybe seven, which says a lot about how seriously a lot of kids took it. Still it was a great experience for me.
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Hmm? That makes no sense. Who can attest to that? The bass lines or parts are the instructions. It contains the rules or how they break them. Do,you really need someone else to tell you how well the song is written? Even a non musician can tell you how the song touch them.
You don’t need to know the (name of) theory to be a good bass player you can use you knowledge from playing songs to arrange yourself a delicious composition by piecing together part of the songs you know. Do you think Pino Palladino sit down and say I think I’m going to add this Lydian mode here. No! He just think I like this Stravinsky so I’ll put it in the intro of “wherever I lay my hat’ version of Paul Young.
Playing/learning songs teaches you everything you need to know not only about that song but that bassist and his/her music. When you stop learning songs and just go straight to learning and improvising you’ll land a gig as a teacher or a YouTuber but not much else.
You read a great novel because it’s a great novels even if you are a great writer yourself. Good taste and judgement comes from a lot of consumption of good contents. It takes quite an egomaniac to start writing his own novel when he doesn’t know his ass from his elbows.
This is not a good advice.
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This “randomly” came across my YouTube o.O
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I did all that stuff except contests, i consider that to be pretty basic theory. If you’re playing from sheet music, you really don’t need to know what key something is in when you’re given a key signature… if you’re given 2 flats, you really don’t need to know that it’s in Bb. Realistically you don’t even need to know if it’s major or minor either.
That’s an amazing one, even for Neely. One of his best.
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I fully sympathize with this.
I too get bored if I only play / practice songs.
There’s a bunch of good advice and cool tips here for balancing and the the variety within the ‘learning songs’ world…
But I also think improvising is pretty crucial, and I always have that as part of my practice world.
The trouble with only practicing improv is this: you can only ever play what you know how to play and you’ve practiced.
And the great improvisors/composers/bass players of the world are the ones you need to listen to and copy in order to have an improvisatory language and bass vocabulary that will make you a better more musical player.
So, even in the improv world, there’s a lot of learning songs and bass lines.
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I think that to be effective writing music, you need to be able to critically consume the music of others, to understand what they are doing, and learn how people craft their songs. Learning to play the songs of others is one vehicle to use to get there.
To use the writing analogy again, imagine an author that never read and/or studied the works of others, and just started writing without any real models for what makes effective storytelling. This might work for maybe 0.1% of authors, but even they would be lucky to pull it off. The same seems true of music to me.
So, learning to play the songs is one path to get there. Critical listening is also key, developing “big ears”. There’s also theory study, but without context for that study, it doesn’t seem very worthwhile; the other two things are what give you that context.
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Like anything else in life…. Only YOU know what works best for YOU…. Just keep the balance and…
Keep On Thumpin’!
Lanny
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Improvising is an active process. You’re going to make mistakes along the way but you’re learning what works and what doesn’t. Learning songs, in contrast, is a robotic, passive process where you’re playing what’s there on the page.
It’s very good advice, but from what you’ve said there you haven’t understood anything of what I’ve said. For example, I didn’t even hint that you need to know concepts by name to put them into practice, which isn’t necessarily true but helps to communicate with other musicians.
The fact is that you don’t need to understand anything of what you’re playing to be able to play it.
This is clearly demonstrated on forums like Talkbass and Reddit and various guitar forums. So many self-labelled "intermediate bass player"s or even "advanced player"s saying that they’ve been playing for years, and “can play really difficult songs”. They actually measure their ability to play the bass in terms of the difficulty of the songs that they can play. And there lies my point.
But they ask for advice to be able to jam/improvise with others, yet unsurprisingly find that they can’t because they don’t even know the notes on the fretboard or how they relate to each other, have a poor sense of rhythm and timing because they’ve never practiced effectively and systematically with a metronome or drums, have no pocket whatsoever, they typically have little if any knowledge of theory because they usually think it’s a waste or too hard work, and have seemingly never picked up anything of substance from the hundreds or thousands of songs that they’ve stated to have played.
There are countless weekend warriors on Talkbass who lament that they have never improved over the years because they have no free time outside of learning the various set lists for the gigs. This should further tell you something.
I didn’t say that you shouldn’t ever learn any song because you have to have some context, but learning songs as the primary way to become good at bass is futile, and will only at best result in becoming a mediocre bass player.
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This what I’m aiming for. All Hail Mediocrity!
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First of all, thank god we are not “talk bass”. Many trolls there.
Are you talking about the same person or group of people in your example? The self-labeled intermediate and/or advanced weekend warriors? It sounded like you were describing people who’s never been in a band before.
Then it makes no sense that someone skilled enough to play difficult songs but yet don’t know their notes on the fretboard or having decent sense of timing and rhythm. As those skills are a prerequisite for playing “difficult” songs. Not knowing how to improvise is one thing but having poor sense of timing does not make sense.
Did you mean “solo’ when you said improvised, that would make better sense, and I agree. Playing melodies usually not something us Bassos do. But improvising especially when you are in a band of any level is what we do from the first rehearsal. What do you do when you already played the 2 songs you know, you jam. The drummer would do his thing, then the guitarist would do his and the bassist with throw in some bass lines and fills. Every bands I know do this, lots of noodling, too much in fact. That’s improvising. I’ve done that since 8th grade with 4 notes and bad sense of timing and rhythm but I was jamming with a big ass smilies on my face.
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I too finished Bass Buzz about a year ago…Try James an Ebass Guitar…good 30 day intros to Rock, Funk and Blues…he makes working on technique fun by introducing bite size pieces you can master and use backing tracks in each style of music…as has some good refresher courses similar to Josh’s instruction…great teacher to take your playing to next level
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Maybe you are a composer.
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I am the world’s OKest bass player, and proud of it.
I am the best bass player in the house (and I am pretty sure on the street), so that’s something.
Many here are here for fun and enjoyment.
Why do they need to be anything other than mediocre?
Do you have some data to back this assertion?
How do you know?
Quite a statement.
Are you more than mediocre since you seem to have mastered the art of practicing.
Perhaps you would like to post some video or audio of your playing to show us all what we can become if we practice appropriately, as to date I don’t believe we have seen your playing.
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They called me the King of the middle of the road. I’m sure you an I can’t share the road. We’d be slamming into each other all day, lol.
Now that’s an interesting request, I betcha he’s probably Felix Pastorius’s mentor.
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Not really. I like learning songs. Not so good at improv…wind up with just basic patterns. Nothing ever ‘groovy.’
Whatever keeps a bass in your hands is right.
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