Hi everyone. The live hangs have been much less frequent due to a combination of illnesses, family stuff and, most of all, the website/course development.
The website had the huge update last year which took up a lot of my time and I then embarked on creating 4 courses over this year. The courses take A LOT of work and I literally have no time to do other stuff during development. We have 3 kids so I’m usually up pretty damned early (in between 4 and 5 in the morning most days) and I then go into the studio and work through until the evening when I go home to be with the family. I do this 7 days a week so barely ever have a day off.
I was always open about the live hangs. I do them when I get a spare hour. They are never going to be a consistent regular thing.
Unfortunately, the nature of Talkingbass means I‘m pretty much a one man team. I do the web development, video recording and editing, marketing, SEO and everything else myself. Ellen is now community manager so that takes the pressure off that side of things but everything else is me. As you can imagine, that makes for little spare time. I’m hoping to get some time free for more live stuff soon and I’ll definitely be doing the occasional one-of YouTube live’s. There will be one coming up this next week as a New Year special.
@markjsmith Thanks for the update, Mark. I appreciate all you do.
Have a Happy New Year!
P.S. I wish you were still moving to Texas, but I understand why you aren’t. Cheers.
Thanks for the explanation @markjsmith , and fully understand. I look forward to any you’re able to pull off.
I’m trying out the chord tones course - but I find it a bit dense. It feels like a lot of structure is being tossed out, without much context of when we want to use it/or how it’s applied? Like why do I care if we extend to the 9th, 11th, or 13th (and I imagine, the 15th, and beyond is possible too…)?
Am I spoiled by Josh’s technique of motivating learning a bit of theory with a song or fun groove to around and just ned eat my theory vegetables now?
The biggest and most important fundamentals in that course (for me anyway) were how everything is built by stacking thirds in various ways. And then learning those intervals in several directions/patterns moving up and down the fretboard. Very good applied knowledge.
Yeah, the importance of stacking comes out in the first couple of lessons. And it’s a neat pattern, and applies to the fourths too - but now I’m thinking maybe I need to just skip ahead to Module 3 (I’m in the beginning of 2) and see what the applications are. And then maybe work back over time.
Module 1 of Chord Tones Essentials is the foundation of the rest of the modules. It IS a lot of information, but Mark says later on in the course that it is encyclopedic knowledge meant to be referenced pretty much forever, as need be.
The next modules progressively go into how chord tones are used in music, rather than just how they make up chords.
Josh’s approach is aimed squarely at beginners. He makes learning bite-sized chunks of technique and theory fun. It is fun, but it is also a way of learning a little about a lot of bass playing stuff. It’s a smorgasbord.
Mark’s theory courses are music college-level and they require more work on the part of the student. But the results from that work pay off big time in understanding how and why bass lines are constructed.
You can try that, but each module builds on the one before it. It’s best to go through them all in sequence, even if you don’t entirely grasp everything at the first go. You can and likely will reference them many times, as Mark says.
Interesting phrasing - college level course material - I would argue that those are well served by having motivation through out, instead of just chucking a contextless encyclopedia at folks. But I get the spirit of what you’re saying. Thanks! Mark’s already refunded a class when it wasn’t what I thought it would be (Grooves class) and suggested I try this one. I’ll keep this one, to support the industry, but it’s not as accessible as it seems I need/prefer…
If you’ve already gone through B2B, it might be a good idea to do it again. Many folks here have done that and have derived a ton of benefit from it the second time around.
The thing that the course really drove home for me was it reinforced my belief that really the individual intervals and how they fit together are all that truly matter. While you could try and construct musical ideas whole-cloth out of completed chords/modes/scales/etc (and many styles of composition definitely do), just thinking in terms of where you want to go on an interval by interval basis will get you a long way, for both composing yourself and understanding others compositions.
Yeah, I go back through various modules randomly, just cause they’re fun actually and I do pick up a tidbit here and there. I’ve been enjoying my School of Rock Beatles session - some fun Paul baselines in there - and on the side, I’ve been looking for some fun groove warmups. Something longer, like the theme of If You Want Me To Stay and I was thinking the groove class would provide those, but they were shorter and just inspired by songs. So then Chord Tones was recommended as a way to learn how to build the grooves…so I’ll jump into module 3 and then work back to get the logic behind why those grooves work. I see a lot of these patterns already in the Beatles lines…and probably improvise more than I should be during parts of Oh Darling, but I feel like it’s part of the fun!
For one thing, chords become more “interesting”, colorful, expressive when you add extensions. But, there is no reason to go beyond the 13th.
That is because the 9th is the same as the 2nd (one octave up), the 11th is the same as the 4th, and the 13th is the same as the 6th. At this point, you have ALL the notes of a heptatonic scale in that one chord, just not bunched up in the same octave. The 15th would be the same as the 8th (i.e., two octaves from the root), which you already have in the chord.
You can use all or some of these extensions and arrange them in different ways over, e.g., the keyboard of a piano - these can be as chord inversions, or, more generally, as different voicings.
So, it is mainly an artistic and aesthetic choice by the composer to use simple triads, or include extensions etc. Conversely, if you know the chord tones, you know what tones fit nicely and what tones would be considered “outside”, and this informs your choices when writing melodies over the chords, or when improvising over the chords.
But, yes, it is all a bit “tedious” and abstract and it takes time to realize when and how to use that chord tone knowledge.
Try this, though: next time you try to play along some chords and you find yourself sticking to the old root-5th(-octave) bass lines, start including the 9th sometimes, e.g., by sliding up from the octave to the 9th and back to the octave. You will - hopefully - find that this sounds quite good 
You nailed it, @joergkutter. Music theory is a language, with all the intricacies of any language.
As kids, many of us have asked why we need to study algebra: “I’ll never use it!”
Or world history: “Who cares what Napoleon did a million years ago! It doesn’t mean a thing now.”
Or literature, or biology…
Or music theory.
But even those famed players like McCartney, who, like any kid, just wanted to play, he wrote bass lines that were inadvertently rooted in music theory.
I saw an interview with Paul where he said that either he or George would often visit the local music store when they were kids, and the guy working there was a jazzbo who would show them extended chords.
The lads, who just barely knew major and minor chords, were fascinated and they would memorize the chord fingerings. They had no clue what the actual chord tones were, why they went together, why they created tension or harmony or just plain interest, but they were damn cool sounding. And cool is the currency of rock ‘n’ roll.
Many of those “jazz chords” are in the most famous Beatles tunes. Some as final color chords, some used as passing chords.
Paul, John and George learned a hell of a lot more about chord tones music theory from George Martin, the inestimable Fifth Beatle. They were ready and eager to learn the building blocks of music. And they used what they learned to amazing effect.
Now we have Josh, Mark Smith, Ariane, and, and, and…an embarrassment of teacher riches to learn music theory from.
I’ve been working on Chord Tones Essentials for some time already and barely got to the end of Module 1. It feels like quite a lot of information and maybe I wasn’t ready for it when I first tried to advance. But it slowly starts to make sense.
The approach is certainly different from Josh’s, which kinda makes it hard to keep going. The quantity of information might feel a bit discouraging at some point, or frustrating even. It will certainly continue to keep me busy for quite some time. Guess that’s the price to pay once you want to progress into the intermediary levels 
It gets progressively more interesting (read, less tedious) as the modules progress. It requires commitment to get through the gag-and-gut stuff, for sure, but it pays big dividends when you do.
I found that watching each video away from the bass was very helpful to making progress. I would watch one or more before going to sleep at night. When I picked up my bass to go through the material, it was much more enjoyable than just following along and trying to absorb the info with my bass strapped on.
thanx for everything @markjsmith you definitely have a full plate. i’m just happy to hear that we may get some live hangs occasionally, they are a lot of fun. well for us anyways 
Interesting! I thought I was the only one who does that. I do/did that in all my courses (including B2B), and find it to be very beneficial to rapid absorption of the materials. Watching prior to bedtime is paricularly helpful.
Think about it…
People go to college to study this stuff.
They go to class (like watching a lesson or two) and then spend all day and all night forcing it in their brain, reinforcing it in their brain, studying it, get tested on it, have study groups, etc.
We watch a lesson or two and go back to playing the riff from “Smoke on the Water”.
It feels overwhelming because it is. As Dr. now says “you gotta do the work”
