Hey all: I have been putting a lot of time into note reading/playing from scores and I keep having this problem where I get “lost” on the low end of the bass—frets 1-5. Unless I am looking at my hand (which is hard to do when reading notes), I am having a heck of a time with note accuracy—a get a lot of flubs and bzzz’s from over or undershooting. Once I am “set” I am fine, but when shifting positions, I just get lost on the low end.
Part of this problem is that I have not committed to a “system” yet—Simandl or 1FPF and when sight reading, my fingers don’t “naturally” cover a note. If I look at a piece and sit down and plan a head of time the best fingering, then I faire better. Another part is due to hand size I microshift a lot, which makes it easy to “lose my homebase” so to speak when shifting a lot.
I am not the best one to give an advice, but I struggled with exactly this issue last couple weeks when I tried to work on my own music I wrote on piece of paper. I “solved” it by periodically anchoring my position on the third fret with my thumb. Not that I have my thumb glued on on the edge of the neck all the time, just a little stretch and tap. After a while I learned how this action should feel and it’s not that hard to learn how to modify the position in response to the way how it feels.
In my opinion, It all comes down to muscle memory in the end.
What helped me was practicing in front of a mirror and looking at the mirror rather than my hand. After a while it came natural and I stopped looking.
Very basic at the beginning, then becomes more complex. The key to success with this course is the guided exercises. If you do the work, you WILL succeed.
You’ll need to commit!
Whichever system you go with, once you tell your fingers what their job is in each position, you’ll do it and have it dialed in.
But if there’s a question and if things aren’t systematic it’s real real hard to make it work while sight reading.
You can skip these parts - kinda. At least the videos that “learn ya” and instead focus on the exercises that take string by string, position by position and embed the notes/frets into your head/fingers/eyes/ears.
There are great speed drills and sample pieces to work up to speed etc. Reading notes is one thing, having your finger play that note as you go along (without liking cause your reading the notes of course) is the key.
After studying several TalkingBass.net courses, it’s apparent that Mark doesn’t assume a student has a lot of prior knowledge of theory, fingerboard note mastery, or music theory.
Since he offers so many courses across various topics, and he presumes not every student will take every course, his approach is wise.
That said, he definitely covers some basic music theory and/or technique exercises from one course to another. I still watch every lesson’s video because fundamentals are always worth repeating. Also, I dig how he presents fundamentals slightly differently as they pertain to each specific course topic. Mark’s had a lot of experience teaching university-level music courses, and it shows.
It also works going down on scale length to 32” or 30” too any shorter I still have to look.
That said going up in scale you have to recalibrate it a bit. I went up to 35.5” and found myself fretting the top of the fret(on the wrong notes) a few times, lol.
This happens a bit in 34" scale going Fender to Rickenbacker etc. let alone Hofner, etc
I acutally purposefully switch bases when doing this course (now Vol. II) to build in some quick ‘self calibration’ techniques going bass to bass as I go along. Same kinda thing needed from bari to sopranino on sax. A bit of variation helps if you build it into your routine.
It does take a tiny muscle memory tweak to sightread when shifting down to short scale from long scale, and vice versa, but it’s not bad at all. Playing triads through the circle of fourths helps recalibrate to a given scale length nicely.
I have found that if I do about 5-10 minutes of scale work staying in the area of the first fret, my hands kinda know how far to shift. I still get some buzzes and clacks but I am getting much better at doing it cleanly. I am trying to drill the muscle memory into them but doing it slowly over time.
@PamPurrs, I’m thinking about doing Mark’s ear training course and then his sight reading course. I know you did the sight reading course on a fretless. So you think that made it a lot harder? My two primary basses are a fretless 4 string and a fretless 5 string so using those for the courses would seem to make the most sense.