No. Not at all. Plenty of people, even big names like Victor Wooten, have small hands. The idea of needing a short scale bass because of small hands is a huge unfounded myth. Your just asking your hands and fingers to do things they haven’t done before and it takes your brain a little while to build these new pathways.
This. All this.
You are still at the very beginning compared to where you’ll be at the end of this course. I highly recommend trusting Josh and the process. He will get you there.
Hi, Josh - I’m on Module 6 at the moment, and thus far I’ve found the course pretty easy (with the exception of Billy Jean.) I have a music background, however, and play a little guitar and a lot of piano, so what I’ve really needed most from the course is technique guidance.
I’m finding it very difficult to play cleanly; I tend to make a lot of mechanical noise when I’m playing, and I get a fair amount of buzzing due to either inadequate fretting pressure or poor finger placement within the fret.
Anyway, my question is whether you have specific exercises or lessons I should be working on to improve the cleanliness of my playing. I’m doing OK with muting strings (I think) but I still feel like I sound pretty amateurish, particularly when I’m trying to play faster and transitioning over medium to large intervals.
Hail @termimalp! If you want to grab Josh’s attention, you can always throw up the Josh signal by putting the @ in front of his name… like this: @JoshFossgreen
Then he’ll get pinged that he’s been mentioned in a post.
For my students who struggle with playing clean, I’ve found it’s almost always a result of the student moving through material faster than they can play cleanly.
I always want everyone to play slow, steady, beautifully, sustained and clear before moving on to more challenging material.
Of course, we all want to feel and experience progress, so no one (self included) does this.
If you find that things aren’t clean, start doing slow-down exercises.
Play whole notes through a major scale at 60 or 70 bpm, and make sure each note is gorgeous and round and smooth and perfectly connected to the next note.
At slow tempos you can usually start to see and feel precisely what is going wrong.
If you’re practicing slow enough, you can usually make adjustments and start to fix things.
I second what @Gio said. And if you have particular difficulties with any lesson in any module you can write comments right under the specific video there. I witness to the fact that Josh would always respond in a couple of days.
Reading comments also helps to see if anyone else is struggling with the same issues…
Josh also has made a video particularly on muting technique
You can find a list of all the youtube material matching to B2B course map with this thread from @eric.kiser
Good luck and welcome!
Later maybe I can pick your brains on “how to make my wife play the keyboard for me” because that is what I am struggling on…
Hey Dan! I agree with what @Gio - taking it slow gives you more time to check your technique and make corrections.
And I’d also add - don’t expect total perfection at this point, even if there’s some noise/messiness it’s okay to keep tackling it one day at a time. Even just noticing it is a great first step.
Another thing you can work on slow are finger exercises like this that help you focus on coordination/cleanliness without having to worry so much about playing music -
And the muting video @Fahri linked might help too!
I’m definitely finding myself struggling with moving my anchor finger. Typically it’s fine when I anchor playing two strings, but as soon as I have to move my thumb from A to E or to the pickup I have a little mental malfunction and tend to forget in either direction. Leads to either plucking a muted string or letting strings ring unnecessarily.
I tried the ring finger method of muting A but that was yet another thing to remember and coordinate so I think maybe I’ll focus on getting my thumb anchor correct before I start coming up with shortcuts.
But also, I mean, I’m four weeks into the course and having gone from never holding a bass to … slowly and gingerly … pumping out Billie Jean I think I’ll take a few mental hiccups as things that I will definitely fix
I had the same problem with the anchor in the beginning as well. I found myself consciously trying to remember where to anchor my thumb. It just takes practice and after a while your thumb will know where to go. Now, I don’t even think about it once I start playing.
You’ll get there…
I don’t ever anchor my thumb (I use floating thumb technique) and have found that my plucking fingers automatically follow my fretting fingers, and always magically pluck the same string that I’m fretting. I don’t even have to think about it.
It just takes time and practice.
the high-mids are crazy and there is a weird dynamic behavior in the low-mids. not very easy to work with … the new pickup comes from a MIG Warwick, it must be a much higher quality
no it’s a MEC but from a MIG Warwick, it’s not the same range than on the Rockbass. anyway I had MECs on my Rockbass at the time and I was pretty happy with them.
This is the MEC P soloed on my Streamer, dry signal:
that’s on a 3.2kg Carolena Pine bass. It should sound even deeper on the Ply-bass, plus you got a better MEC I am sure, the MIG pickups are way better.
My struggle today: now I play* two instruments that each have an ocean of shitty, shitty tabs.
I’ve been learning guitar for a total of what, three days now? I know like three chords, and I am already spotting errors in like half the tabs I find for the songs I am looking for. I don’t have to be a guitar hero to know that there is no C# in the C major chord, for example, even if I can’t play that chord yet.
