Mark Smith of Talking Bass has created a frequently asked questions page.
Since many Buzzers have often asked those of us who have studied TB courses many questions about them, here is an excerpt from the TB FAQ page, where Mark describes courses and offers recommendations about study order.
From a complete beginner level, I would recommend the following set of courses to begin with:
Beginner Bass Guitar
Bassic Fundamentals
Groove Trainer For Bass
Technique Builder
The Creative Bassist
Beyond these courses you can move into more focused study. I would recommend:
Chord Tone Essentials
Scale Essentials
Chord tones should always be studied before scales.
Simple Steps To Sight Reading is a huge course devoted to reading music for bass. You can begin that course at any point after Bassic Fundamentals. It should be studied alongside all other courses and will provide lesson material for many years.
Simple Steps To Walking Bass, Slap Bass and Chordal Mastery are style based courses you can take at any point as a supplement if you want to follow those styles/techniques.
The Classical Study courses are aimed at intermediate level players and will greatly improve your technique and harmony knowledge.
Ultimate Music Theory For Bass is a deep dive into music theory for those of you looking to study from beginner theory all the way through to degree level .It is less practical than some of the other courses and features tests after every lesson. You will learn the basics of theory (intervals/scales etc) through to advanced Jazz harmony. It is degree level study for a fraction of the price. I would also recommend this course for any players looking to study at a music college.
hunh. i knew mark has always said chord tones first, but i didn’t really realize he felt so strongly about it (“always”) before scales. i mention this because many people here did scales first and have advocated for it. i personally would say it probably doesn’t matter as much as mark says at the end of the day, but i would also lean towards doing chord tones first. simply because in mark’s eyes chord tones are the fundamental building blocks of music and should be learned first. and part of using these building blocks is to form scales. howevs if you do it the other way around it isn’t that difficult to wrap your head around the concept and won’t prevent you from following along.
A simple triad (essential chord tones) is the tonal framework that fundamentally defines a chord type (e.g., Major, minor, diminished, augmented).
Extensions and alterations of triads (e.g., b7, 9, #11, 13) add color to the chord, providing texture and richer expressions of that chord.
Scales are comprised of chord tones and the interstitial notes between them. That’s why gaining an understanding of chord tones before studying scale construction is what many teachers recommend: Learn the underlying structure first, and then flesh it out.
Yes, it’s all about the intervals and how they combine. And in more detail, in western music the primary chords are all made by stacking major and minor third intervals. The major triad is a major third plus a minor third; vice versa for the minor triad, etc. This pattern extends to extended chords and can be mixed for different kinds of chords.
Mark’s Chord Tones course dives right in to this and gives you immediate tools for how to apply this in practice, both for using chords but more importantly for moving around the fretboard in thirds and other interesting, pleasing sounding intervals. It’s theory that translates to other instruments as well and is much more fundamental and valuable than simply learning scales (which is also important and dovetails nicely with this once you understand interval fundamentals.)
When I learned theory/intervals/etc on other instruments, it was always scals first, and flipping the order is much better. Everythign makes more sense starting with the intervals, which (in the end) are all that really matter.
Yep, learning chord structure is the key to understanding harmony and music theory, in general.
That said, most traditional music teachers (piano, woodwinds, horns, etc.) fall back on emphasizing practicing scales more for teaching students instrument familiarity and dexterity than for learning music theory. Been there. Not fun.
It wasn’t until after I had studied rhythm guitar, and then music theory in college that I realized how fundamentally essential chord tones are to all western music. It was mind-blowing at first, and patently obvious afterwards.
Mark Smith has said many times that, while he could shred on bass when he entered music college, he had no clue what music theory was or how it worked. His courses are born of his experience and how he managed to have all concepts of theory make sense to himself. They are powerful.
For classical music, very possibly. For improvisation and soloing, no.
Chord tones are the absolute foundations of harmony.
Interstitial tones can be chromatic leading tones, enclosure shapes that frame chord tones, or diatonic (scalar) lines — but all are in service of chord tones because they reinforce the chord and keep all other instruments harmonically grounded.
The point is that trad music teachers don’t really care much about teaching music theory. And, in my experience, they are usually instrumentalists who have not studied much theory beyond the required courses of their given degree curriculum (which are no more than freshman and sophomore level, if that much). Not a slam, just fact.