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This is by far my favorite thing posted on this forum to date (Poppy is now second).
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I might have to get a T-Shirt made
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It is a pretty fantastic band name.
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Damn, this thread has just made my morning
Top tier humour ladies and gents.
I love this forum
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The Carpenters tribute album this cover (and the Sonic Youth one) is from is fantastic.
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Thanks for posting that memory @John_E . That was in January of this year and I haven’t made a cover since. The pain was just starting (you can almost see it in my face), and I had no idea it was cancer.
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I’m having some frustration with my index-middle plucking. I’m on day 16 of playing bass and feel like I was better at this last week. I’ve been recording myself playing Another Brick in the Wall for the 50 Songs Challenge for the past few days, and whenever I make the conscious effort with plucking I make so many mistakes with the fretting hand 
So, I need to work on this a lot.
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I am sure this is pretty common in the beginning, after all, playing bass is not natural for the human body/mind. I found when I was having problems like this in the beginning (or now!) I would add a warm up exercise for whatever it was I needed work on (alternate plucking, muting, chord shapes, etc) and would play it slowly and deliberately before being ready for my lesson or song practice. Eventually my speed would improve, my technique would improve, and it was more of a matter of muscle memory than of being conscious of it. Cut yourself some slack, I bet when you were learning to drive a car or ride a bike you were conscious of everything you did, and eventually it became second nature and you started to do it rather than think about it. If you put the practice time in, bass will be like that too.
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This takes time, and ebbs and flows, not to be measured in a week or weeks.
You will find later on that things that you worried about start to come naturally and you won’t notice until you say ‘hey, I am not really worrying about this anymore”.
You are now only really working on getting it all together and getting your eyes, fingers and ears to coordinate. It’s a lifetime pursuit, enjoy it and don’t over analyze it, you will have more fun that way.
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One exercise that I found really helps with this is to just play a C major scale with the fretting hand. The shape becomes so familiar that the fretting hand becomes automatic and it allows you to focus your attention on alternating your plucking fingers.
Start at C on the E-string and extend the scale all the way to the F on the G-string. You’ll have 2 notes on the E string, and three each on the A,D, G strings so the plucking finger used as you cross strings keeps changing. The frets are close together at this point of the neck so you don’t even have to worry about stretching your fingers or moving your thumb.
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Feel like I’ve hit a bit of a wall with the lesson I’m up to (the Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag lesson in module 11). I could not get the hang of it yesterday and let it go and went back to it today and even though it’s not ‘hard’ everything is going wrong: fretting mistakes, wrong strings, fingernails scraping even though they’re cut and filed almost to the skin. Onwards and upwards…
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It’s a thing, man. It will fall into place with practice. All things do. Just keep banging on it.
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That is a tough one. But keep at it, you can do it and when you do it will feel wonderful
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+1 on this. Give it time, and don’t give up. It’ll come.
For me, bass learning followed a little bit of a simple exponential growth model. Slow at first (at first was measured in 4-6 months) and then a transition period where I was learning much faster (for about a year to 18 months) - and then finally a plateau - still learning new songs but rate of improvement is much slower. FWIW - I think my plateau is because I’m not really pushing myself - fairly comfortable with my level of play - allows me to play songs that bring a smile to my face - so not a lot of impetus to practice harder stuff that would make me improve.
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I’ve been struggling a bit with motivation to practice, as opposed to noodling.
One cool thing I’ve noted through noodling -after- learning some theory is that it’s a lot easier to figure out a melody by ear, once I know the key and progression. Doesn’t exactly translate to skill in the fingers, but it’s good progress nonetheless.
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Noodling is practice if you do it with intent 
Once you reach a certain point, noodling can actually be better practice than drilling scales and so on. Noodling gets you to practical application of music. It’s one thing to know the basics, and another to figure out how to use them.
Noodling and learning songs is basically all I have done for a couple years now. I probably should do scales occasionally but more for scale variants up and down the neck because I had the primary shapes memorized years ago.
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