Technique Falling Apart

Technique
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After completing the BassBuzz program, I felt like I’d made some progress, I could play along with a few songs, etc but I decided to take some lessons to fix any bad habits, etc.

The instructor noted I’m moving my fretting hand around too much and not keeping my thumb on the back of the neck. I can maintain proper left hand when doing an exercise or playing scales, but trying to play a song, I can’t keep up even at half speed, and my fretting technique deteriorates into 'thumb over the neck again. My fingers hurt like I just started, and proper hand position leaves the base of my thumb aching and fatigued.

The instructor has also has me doing some sight reading. Since I played piano and tuba years ago, I naively expected my ability to read music to come back to me with practice, but it does not. I can memorize the bass line one note at a time, but struggle with even the simplest sight reading exercise.

The other problem is trying to learn a song, I can have the song down ok, but in front of the instructor, I’m all over the place, wrong frets, wrong string, even.

I’m honestly working at this, I’ve been practicing two hours a day, but feel the harder I work, the more I’m regressing.

I feel like there’s something I"m just not ‘getting’…Seriously considering selling my gear and finding another pastime. I just don’t get it.

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Slow down.

Seriously.

Slow down.

If you went through B2B and could play along with the lessons, you were doing something right. You just need to slow everything way down now so you can practice building consistent technique.

This will relieve pressure on yourself as your brain builds neural pathways for clean playing.

This all might sound simplistic and “Who cares about that? I just want to play!”, but slowing down and being patient with yourself are the ways to improve.

Also, it sounds like you might be getting not so great instruction from your f2f teacher. Forget sightreading for now: If you’re having trouble with your fretting hand technique, THAT’s what you ought to concentrate on, again, through slow, low-stress practice. Relaxed, methodical repetition is the way to improve your playing.

Besides all that, give yourself a break. Stressing about where you are/aren’t as a player is a waste of life. If you are a beginner/recently-intermediate player and you think you suck, embrace that. Because sucking is a huge part of life. We ALL suck…until we suck a little less. Then a little less. And so on.

There are many pro players who have been quoted as saying that they hope to learn their instrument someday before they die. Truer words were never spoken.

Just go back to the fundamentals and take it easy. A great way to do this is to go through the B2B course again.

Many Buzzers have done that only to find that they picked up so much more the second time. Sightreading and teachers can be great, but they can wait until your technique is clean and consistent. Practicing slowly and giving yourself permission to suck is the way. You got this.

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I’m just gonna throw this out there… not all in-person instructors are great. Just saying.

What you were doing was working before. This guy has you ready to quit. I would think about that a moment.

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The bass player’s #1 job (in my opinion) is to be cool. My first instinct was to say you are trying to tackle too much at once but if you are having trouble playing in front of a teacher you need to work on being cool. RELAX Be ok with missing notes here and there. It’s better to miss, take a little break and jump back in rather than being rushed and fighting to catch up.

My best teacher has been Youtube “ bass tab” at 1/2 speed and then move to 3/4 when you can play most of it without looking at the tab.

Also pick a song from Josh’s list and work on that. I know the jams that I would pick personally would take forever to learn because they are bass heavy, technical and probably above my level.

PIck a song, practice and play it until it makes you vomit. Then play it again. Get to the point where you can play the song without even thinking.

But honestly I feel like playing with a stranger is intimidating you whether it is conscious or not. Be cool ignore the other person in the room and play like you are at home. You are paying to be there not the other way around.

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You got this. It’s been said, but it bears repeating - slow and deliberate pracitice, and build your speed up from there when you’ve practiced enough that you can’t get it wrong. Some folks (like @Al1885 for instance) will even suggest working up to playing it at a faster tempo than normal, so that when you slow back down it seems easier.

You are reacting to pressure. Be it time pressure to play something you mostly know at speed perfectly, extra pressure from having someone watching you, etc. It used to happen to me whenever I turned the camera on to try and get a good take for a video cover. At first, it would take me 50 takes - no exaggeration - to get a perfect playthrough. But, but… I “know” the song! Well, I knew it well enough to play it right under perfect conditions. But the pressure threw me for a loop. Key was to just practice it more first before trying to record. Pressure sucks.

One other thing I learned: playing four times a day for 30 mins is more effective than playing two hours straight. (Not saying that much practice is needed, but you mentioned playing that much.). For many reasons. For one, it’s easier to stay fresh and not devolve into bad technique because of being tired. For another, the number of times we get our brains into a specific context from whatever else it was we were doing beforehand impacts how well we absorb what’s being learned.

Again, you got this. We all get frustrated - commonly when comparing ourselves to others or even where we think we ought to be. Enjoy the playing, drill the tricky parts through slow methodical repetition. Repeat. Trust the process!

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Point of Focus
It is very easy to get hung up on what we do wrong, rarely do we give ourselves credit for what we do well for our skill levels.
Go back to what you remember being happy doing, repeat this until you remember that have achieved some considerable improvement from when you started and that you can play. If all you see is the problem, it will get you down and the enjoyment you feel when playing is diminished and it becomes a chore.
As @MikeC says We ALL suck, but that does diminish over time. @howard is also right, all teachers are not great at building people up. Some can downright demoralise .
Concentrate on you, feel happy about playing most of all then work on improvement

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everything these guys said ^^^^

but also if you are practicing 2 hours a day and just getting frustrated you may be just beating yourself up. your brain needs time to process what’s being thrown at it, especially new tasks. try cutting back to an hour for a while, it might help.

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Some great advice here, slow down, break up practice into smaller slots, don’t beat yourself up etc.

The thing that intrigued me in your post is that the teacher has you trying to sight read while also addressing fretting technique, while, errr, also addressing the pressure of playing in front of someone. That’s a hell of a lot for the brain to process all at once! Personally, at present, I’d be trying to do only one of those things at a time. As others have said, perhaps all teachers are not made equal.

I watched >> this << yesterday and found it interesting. The key takeaway for me was to focus on the process goals. One sets an end goal, then puts that to the side as one focuses on the small steps required to get to that end goal. I’m also a cyclist … to comfortably ride the big summer rides, one rides an incremental plan throughout the winter and spring, each week building fitness and stamina. Josh’s B2B course does the same, incrementally building capability. So there is nothing new in the video I posted, but it deserves repeating.

Anyway, that my two penny worth…! Slow down, set a goal, break the goal down and enjoy the ride. :metal:

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Playing for someone else can be a lot of pressure versus playing just for yourself, even if you aren’t actively thinking about that. The same thing happened to me the first time I tried to play on stage at an open mic: songs I could play with my eyes closed were suddenly a mess, fingers flying all over the place, plucking the wrong strings, forgetting lyrics. It might seem that being in front of an instructor is a “safe place”, but I’d argue it triggers all of the same potential anxieties as being on stage, if not more–you know the instructor is listening critically, while typically I’m way more critical of my performance than anyone in a crowd. :sweat_smile:

I’ll tell you the same thing a friendly bassist that also played that night told me: it gets easier if you just keep doing it. And sure enough, the next time I went up for an open mic, it was easier.

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Eeek!! I’m playing an open mic this Thursday, the second time I’ll have played ‘live’. Last week’s band practice was a hot mess (for me), all over the place! Mannn, I’m drilling those songs at the moment! Just played the 6 songs we will select from, and will probably play this over today, another half a dozen times. And tomorrow, and Tuesday and Wednesday, ready for Thursday!

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I would repeat the others’ mantra, slow down.
Don’t beat yourself up, you are a bass player and you clearly care enough to be self critical.
There is a fabulous book ‘The Practice of Practice’ that really helped me when I was ready to give up cos I was so rubbish at bass.

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The tired and aching thumb is probably too much pressure on the strings. There have been many posts on these pages about this. try just plucking a fretted string over and over whilst easing the pressure until it buzzes, you might be surprised how much you h ave to ease off before this happens.

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I agree with everything that’s been said here.

#1 - slow down. If you’re playing a song and aren’t playing it well with good technique, you’re not playing it slow enough.

#2 - pick easier songs. The nice thing about Josh’s course is most of the songs we learn in it have pretty easy basslines (and we’re usually only learning one, easy riff from the song, not the whole song). I’ve found it difficult to know how difficult a song is going to be to learn/play until I try it. I may listen to a song, think it will be easy, and then go to learn it and it’s a lot harder than I think. Focus on learning easier songs until you get your technique dialed in.

#3 - shorter practice more often. I’ll even go farther than some others have here and say practicing 5 minutes a day is better than practicing an hour or two once or twice a week. As soon as you feel any kind of fatigue, whether it’s in your hands or mental fatigue. Stop. Take a break.

Also, this isn’t said often enough, take a day (or more) off once in a while. There’ve been so many times I haven’t played my bass for a few days, and when I pick it up again, things I struggled with before are suddenly easier. Sometimes your brain needs time to process things. Some time away from the instrument can actually be beneficial.

#4 play in front of a mirror and/or video record yourself practicing. The mirror is best if you can look at it while playing, because you can correct in real time. But either way you may see issues you’re not aware of in your technique.

#5 - be disciplined and do not accept less than good technique from yourself. This involves going back to #1 slowing down and #2 picking easier material. If you find your technique slipping, slow down. If still slipping, slow down more. If still slipping, pick something easier to practice.

If I remember right, some of the easier songs in the BtBA course are Bad Moon Rising by CCR. Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash, and Another Brick in the Wall pt. 2 by Pink Floyd. So those are songs you can probably get up to tempo with good technique, so you can have something fun to play. Also, I know it’s boring, but you can also play scales slowly–major, minor, major & minor pentatonic, blues scale. Practicing these will help in a lot of other ways too.

I know from personal experience this is kind of a difficult tightrope to walk. Playing things at our level with good technique can often involve playing songs/exercises that aren’t as fun. I’m sure we all have songs we really want to play that are beyond us right now. (I’ve got a whole list!) It can be tempting to tackle a song like that when we’re not ready. What happens then, at least for me (and you it sounds like) is we manage to get the song out, but can only do it with bad technique. So it takes some discipline to stick with things in the right difficulty zone, and some creativity to find things in that zone to play that are fun.

But please don’t lose heart! You can do this, and you’ll be so glad later if you keep at it. If I were you, I think the first thing I’d do is find something easy and fun to play that I like, and work on that until I find the joy again.

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Thanks for the encouragement, everyone. To be fair, the instructor doesn’t pressure me, he’s very personable and I like him a lot and expected him to push me, particularly coming to him with a little bit of ability/experience rather than being totally green to music.

If I can get the hand position sorted, that’s 80% of the battle right now. I can maintain proper thumb position doing scales, but I get sloppy when playing a song.

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One thing that hasn’t been addressed here is the magical power of one-on-one lessons and teachers to make you play like a complete buffoon.

I teach private lessons and always mention this to students as I remember experiencing it on the student end.
I’d practice my ass off, sit down in front of my teacher, and play like a fool.
It’s brutal.

If you feel like you’re practicing and making progress on your own, that’s great. Lean into that.
If you feel like you aren’t able to play in front of the teacher, it can very probably be because it’s a very stressful thing to do, and is tricky for everyone.

Other than that one tid-bit, I’ll just give a general +1 to the good advice about slow, steady sailing that’s been posted here already.

Good luck!

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I experienced this with my sax prof in university music school. In private weekly lessons, he’d assign pages of violin concertos for me to learn. He would break them down and give me specific technique instructions on how to navigate tricky (fast and twisty) sections. All that was really valuable and I dug that.

Like @Gio, I’d practice my ass off at home and in on-campus practice rooms, and I got to the point that I sounded pretty damn decent.

But then my weekly lesson would come around.

Even though my professor was a truly great guy who was on my side, I knew he had a PhD in sax and that he was a stone cold pro who could effortlessly make his alto sound like an angel singing/weeping/laughing, at will.

I was totally intimidated to play in front of him and I’d play like a fool, completely fumbling and bumbling even the easier passages I had drilled for days.

Solo performance pressure is real, whether the intended audience is supportive of you, or not.

All to say, you’re not the only one, @MarkeeMark. We’re all human. Just breathe deeply, and keep on keepin’ on, celebrating the small wins along the way. That’s where the joy is. You got this.

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This comes from strangling the neck. Practice applying as little pressure as you can.

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I think at least part of this comes from:
A. This person (the teacher) knows more about the instrument than you do
B. They are looking for mistakes you make
C. You’re paying them for that privilege

Those things add up to more nerves than playing live. In my youth, I always did worse playing during my lessons than recitals due to the above three factors. When you’re performing, (most) people listening aren’t listening to try to find and point out mistakes.

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Some great advice here, I’d also say maybe try something different. Break your practice sessions into a couple of different segments. Where some segments are for progressing/learning and some are just to do what makes you happy while holding a bass. For me, I kinda floated around a bit after I finished B2B. I tried some talking bass lessons, but some of them were way over my head at the time. I needed more experience playing and a way to really slow down what I was trying to learn. So, I started adding Yousician to my practice routine and for awhile, I did a whole lot of that. It allows you to slow way down in practice mode and gradually speed up. It also allows you to label the tabs with notes and all of it really helped me to get more experience playing. Right now, I’m splitting my time between the Talking Bass cord tones class and Yousician. Honestly, Im not a huge fan of the songs on Yousician but they have been fine to learn for the exercise of playing and learning the fret board.

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Playing for a teacher is one thing. Recitals are another. But the absolute bucket of hell is playing before a jury. Yeah, that’s what it’s called in music school. Think of it as a term paper equivalent.

At the end of every semester in college music school, students had to play his/her principal instrument for a jury of professors, and none of them knew us from Adam, nor did they care that our grades hung in the balance of our individual performances.

The hallway outside the auditorium was lined with students waiting their assigned time to enter and play. Inside, three judges sat at a table, ready to assess each player’s abilities. More than once as I waited, students would emerge the auditorium in tears. That sure didn’t help the mood for the rest of us!

I’m certain many aced their juries. I didn’t quite do that well, but it was oddly easier for me to play before this random tribunal than it was to play for my prof; I guess I felt like I didn’t want to let him down. Those other folks? I knew they were just doing a job, so I just approached it as I was just there to do mine. Nothing personal to any of us. I still hated those damn things, though.

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