TalkingBass Courses After B2B

Lounge
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Hi everyone. I thought I’d just leave a post to help those of you wondering which TalkingBass courses are worth pursuing after completing B2B.

I’ve received at least 5 emails in the last few days asking this question (I guess partly due to the Black Friday Sale) so I’m going to work through my usual answer and hopefully it’ll shed some light on the best options. I’m a regular browser here in the forum and like to help out where I can with various questions on theory etc. (away from the TalkingBass stuff). If you have any questions I’m always here. So here goes:

Chord Tone Essentials has been recommended many times here on the forum by people that have tried it as a B2B follow up. And it is great for learning the most useful ‘theory’ you will apply in your bass playing.

However, it is a real deep dive into harmony principles and could potentially be a little too in depth for beginners (I’m considering most of you beginner to intermediate players - 1 to 3 years into playing). The most important thing you need at this stage is general playing. I’ll come back to CTE in a sec.

I personally think the Groove Trainer and Creative Bassist courses are better suited to the BassBuzz crowd.

Groove Trainer is a set of 120 bass grooves that start from ABSOLUTE beginner level and work up to advanced 16th note syncopated funk. There are a bunch of lessons that work on aspects of rhythm, harmony, reading, groove, locking in with drums etc. Then all of these principles are outlined in each groove as you work through them. That’s why they start very easy. It allows you to work on those concepts in easy grooves before moving forward in a very progressive way.

The Creative Bassist is for players that want to learn how to ‘create’. That means bass lines, riffs, fills and finally solo.

It’s great for beginner to intermediate players and is BIG. You’ll learn how to create bass lines on the fly and create interesting melodic riffs and fills in a jamming situation. If you want to jam with other people or just create your own bass lines, this is the course for you. It also gives you a reason for moving into the other deep dive courses like Chord Tone Essentials, Scale Essentials and Simple Steps To Sight Reading.

You learn how to APPLY any of the theory you learn in the future which gives you more reason for learning ‘stuff’.

Back to Chord Tone Essentials… it’s a good one if you want to learn the theory behind chord construction. You learn the construction and arpeggios for EVERY chord in Western music. This allows you to create bass lines, fills and solos through any chord progression. You also learn how to map those chord tones over the entire fretboard and then finally apply them in your music.

So it’s a good one and will give you a lifetime of study. However, you might prefer something a little more practical and more suited to beginners. It all depends on your current level and how long you’ve been playing.

There are a ton of other courses available but those are my recommendations for those of you just completing B2B. I should also give a shout out to Simple Steps To Sight Reading for those of you wanting to learn how to read. It’s a MASSIVE course with over 700 pages of exercises that takes you from the basics of reading all the way through to a level far beyond anything you’ll ever need for regular bass playing. We’re talking very advanced professional sight reading standard.

As for the other courses like the Walking, Slap Bass, Classical Study, Technique etc., they are all fine if you want to try something a little more ‘specific’ but for those of you looking for general, useful courses at the B2B experience level, I think Groove Trainer and The Creative Bassist are the best options.

I’ve spoken to Josh about the close connection being built between BassBuzz and TalkingBass and hopefully most of you will have seen our interview together on Youtube . Josh is a brilliant teacher and I’ve watched BassBuzz progress from the first YouTube video. It’s a fantastic achievement and I love that we have a great co-operative community developing in the online bass world. The same goes for SBL. We all get on really well and offer totally different platforms so there’s never any issues or rivalry.

Hopefully this post will help those of you that have been wondering about next steps. Those recent emails made me realise I should probably put something out there!

Mark

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More "After B2B" advice requested
Will 2022 to be the year Josh gives us an intermediate course?
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That was a very helpful post. Thank you Mark.

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Thanks Mark. is this ‘creative bassist’ course on offer at the moment with Black Friday, and if so 2 questions please.

  1. how much does it cost?
  2. how does it differ from lukes ‘critical mass bass line challenge’ course on becomeabassist that i paid for a while ago, that teaches you how to create ‘as many bass lines as possible’. from memory i think i paid around £30, so im curious as to how the content may differ and if its worth paying for another course that may just contain roughly the same content.

Thank you.

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It will be much bigger and a lot more comprehensive than Luke’s course. Nothing against that course, this is just a totally different thing. It takes you from basics of creating bass lines all the way through to soloing through chord progressions. It’s in two volumes (both are included in the purchase)

Here’s a PDF breakdown of all the lessons included: https://bit.ly/4odIXsi

The course is here in the store: https://bit.ly/4p4btOA

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Thank you Mark. i guess like a lot of people who’ve just finished the course, i only know a few notes on the fretboard (i know where GAB CDE FGAB CDE are over the 4 strings and find the sharps and flats by locating these first and moving up or down a fret) and even then im a bit slow at finding them. i know my major and minor scale shapes and am just starting to try and memorise a few pentatonic shapes.

just lately ive been concentrating on learning a few songs (13 in my arsenal so far but i dont particularly know the note names or why theyre chosen)

do you think id need to up my theory knowledge and speed of learning and locating notes and shapes before this course would be its most useful to me?

thank you

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@sadexpunk

You can jump right into Groove Trainer from where you are now, no worries there. I actually jumped right into Simple Steps to Sight Reading from where you are now a bit over a year ago, along with Groove Trainer and Technique builder and did just fine.

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thanks Jeff but its the Creative Bassist i was thinking about as my preference moving forward is to try and learn how to create my own shapes/riffs when jamming with friends. i dont get many opportunities to do this actually, but its what id like to get better at.

thanks

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@sadexpunk

I can’t speak for Creative Bassist directly, I do own it but haven’t started it yet. However I can say, after taking numerous Talking Bass courses (Sight Reading, Groove Trainer, Technique Builder, Chord Tones, Theory, Scale Essentials) that every one of Mark’s courses assume little to no knowledge at the beginning and are very progressive. Since he created Creative Bassist specifically for those wanting more application and less theory, I’d assume it would be perfect for your situation. I’ve been extremely happy with the TalkingBass courses and they’ve provided 100’s of hours of top notch course work.

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:100:

Mark’s course are uniformly excellent.

That said, I think the Groove Trainer course is a particularly seamless gateway from B2B for players who started bass from scratch, i.e., having had no prior musical training and/or never having played a stringed instrument before.

Groove Trainer is not theory-based; it is designed to be entirely practical. Like B2B, it gets students playing riffs. This approach is useful for folks who want to play something, but have no good idea what to play. GT also starts with very easy grooves before it gradually presents more involved rhythms as it progresses.

In my opinion, Creative Bassist is a great course for players with some groove experience already in their pockets. In contrast to Groove Trainer, CB requires students to invent grooves, however simple they might be at first. The aim of CT is to “teach a man to fish” as opposed to handing him a fish sandwich (e.g., a riff, as in Groove Trainer).

All to say, Groove Trainer is a collection of doable, playable riffs that not only gives students a whole lot of bite-sized riff etudes but it also plants ideas of how riffs can sound and feel (not unlike learning songs, but much shorter in length and quicker to master with a little practice).

For those armed with some riff experience, Creative Bassist can provide a framework to learn how to write one’s own grooves, riffs, fills and, eventually, solos. Caveat: Creative Bassist requires a lot of self-motivated homework as the whole point of the course is to make players capable to create what they play.

These are just my thoughts on these two different Talking Bass courses based on my experience with them.

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Thanks a lot, @markjsmith . Really helpful summary of potential next courses: appreciate it.

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Thanks Mark!,

Big fan of your chord essentials course btw!

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thanks all. i think i’ll dip my toes in with the groove trainer course then as it does indeed appear to be a more basic ‘starter’ course which is probably more aligned to my level right now.

i see the price is listed in USD, is there any way to pay in £’s? not sure how the conversion works and which card i’d be better off using if i have to pay in dollars. i wouldnt want a particular credit or debit card to fleece me in conversion rates.

thanks

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@markjsmith is a Brit, so I’d think paying in pounds would be pretty doable. I tagged Mark on this post, so he will be notified when he next logs in to the forum. When he does, he will likely weigh in with a verdict on your question. :balance_scale:

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I’m really interested in learning to play jazz and maybe one day make the jump to upright bass.

I assume the walking bass course would fit that best, but would you recommend the chord tone one instead? Or the creative bassist?

I’m very happy to learn and apply theory.

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Chord Tones Essentials is a great course to learn harmony and arpeggios, which are key to playing jazz bass.

Walking Bass is a course that specializes in learning how chord tones, chromatic tones, leading tones, enclosures, etc. are applied to bass playing. While walking bass is very prevalent in jazz lines, it also applies to every genre of bass playing. That said, Walking Bass is aimed at playing jazz.

Personally, I studied Chord Tones as my first TalkingBass course. It is a comprehensive deep dive into bass harmony and provides years of practice. If you dig harmonic theory, go for it. But if you want a comprehensive music theory course, consider Mark’s Ultimate Music Theory for Bass Guitar.

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For those interested, TalkingBass is having a Black Friday sale right now.

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@THRILLHO

I recently added upright to my mix and Jazz is where I want to eventually focus my playing. I did Chord Tones first and am currently working through Scales, with the plan to then move onto Walking Bass. This is the order Mark has recommended on his site, however it’s a long haul. I’ve also been working through Sight Reading for over a year and that’s been a great course, but again a very long haul.

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i guess he doesnt log in that much, not a surprise tho, probably a very busy man. i guess you wouldnt see messages either unless logged in so not much point going down that route either.

just hope that when he finally does log in the black friday discount is still on :slight_smile:

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Hi there. The price is always in dollars on the site but it gets converted during checkout with Paypal or Stripe. I actually used to have a conversion set up on the site but it totally messed up during sales due to errors in conversion after percentage reductions. I’ll probably try getting around that issue at some point but I had to ditch the conversion during sales which made it seem pointless having it set up during non sale times.

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I know this is about TB courses. Since you mentioned in the video that there aren’t many other options besides TB, BB, and SBL, I’d like to recommend Dan Hawkins Music Theory as a follow-up course. The concept is quite different, and you have to do a lot of independent work because the material isn’t always presented in a straightforward way. Some things lack specific visualization, and occasionally he says something that would have been better corrected with a new take. I wouldn’t classify it as “premium,” but it’s definitely worth the price with a money-back guarantee.

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