It’s actually easier than you think. Just grab your bass, determine the root or song key (I just google it these days), and figure out the intervals while listening to the song.
Tabs can be a good starting point too; no matter how bad the tabs may be, at least usually they are in the right key and start from a reasonable root.
Definitely see your point and feel it too. I went through the reading music like a bootcamp as I was young. I can read it like a book but other than announcing the note I have no idea what music theory it fall into or what’s it suppose to do. Luckily, I play bass so I can quickly relate to the note, 
I do encourage you to give it a try and maybe learn a few songs a year by ear once you can do that then the fun begin. Not gonna lie, unless you are a professional transcriber on Fiver, this could take a while but don’t treat it like you are on Fast and Furious X by Castaway with all the time in the world. My first song took me a few months to finish and years later I found out I was still wrong, 
Owner of a lonely heart.
The learning and transcribing by ear is not to bad for me once I got around to do it. That said, I’m so bad at inputting them on Guitar Pro 8 notation is one thing the tab is just brutal, One of the song I did Lemonade it’s a minute and some change, that took me a couple of hours to transcribe but took me a week to input
Learning music by ear was one of my goals when I picked up bass so I’m definitely still going to work on it. It’s a skill like any other, I suck at it because I haven’t trained/practiced it but I can improve it.
I’m going to start trying to improve it on stuff like the easy 50 first songs, not 12/8 iron maiden songs with multiple key shifts though. I write that down and it seems obvious I was being silly but, uh, I just want to learn some favorite songs and didn’t really think about difficulty
Someone said this to me very early in my music life I just started playing bass on a 6 string guitar.
Things that which we persist in doing become easier, not because the nature of thing as change but our ability to do has increased.
To take the first step is already 50% there.
Learning by ear is a very troublesome thing for me, because a note on bass is a different note on alto/bari sax and yet another note on tenor/soprano. Whoever came up with transposing instruments should be dug up and shot.
Ok it’s somewhat hilarious that I ended up deciding to take another shot at transcribing by ear on Folsom Prison Blues, and I ended up a half step flat of Josh on the recurring root/fifths. I played the C# and F# in Josh’s tabs and it sounded worse so I went and looked through the 50 first song threads and it seems like the tuning is all over on different versions. I ended up matching this Ultimate Guitar transcription pretty closely Song 4 - "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash - #153 by Barney that Barney screenshot in the thread so I guess I’ll call it a win-ish.
My head hurts now lol.
It really helps to be holding your instrument and trying intervals out. You can do it!
So we know where you will be, if the zombie apocalypse happens and the dead will rise from their graves!
I cannot imagine doing this without an instrument in front of me. Keyboard might be a tiny bit more convenient, but I don’t have one.
Yeah I actually use keyboards for this too, much much easier to visualize the intervals.
Struggling with the darn flying fingers myself. I just try to be mindful of it and do the best i can to keep them in check. I quit letting it stop me from learning though, as before I wouldn’t get past a lesson or module until I had my fingers in check. I imagine the more I play and practice they will be more well behaved. If not, I might have to cut them off.
Do this slowly every day, and speed up gradually. It will tame your flying fingers and teach you a few more tricks, too.
Yep! How to unlock - practice it a bunch lol. 
It’s to try to mimic the flow of how the piece works on cello, those notes are a mix of open string and fretted note to get a cool change in tone without changing pitch. it sounds kinda dumb/boring if you play it all on the same fret/string, so it’s more of a tone/sound thing than a technique decision.
yup
TL;DR: I have no insights, it’s very very hard and requires skills almost totally unrelated to normal bass playing!
Barre on guitar is hard enough. On bass it must be brutal
I appreciate the honesty of this reply.
It’s actually less of a struggling and more of a success, but I’m trying to learn Blink 182’s The Rock Show for Valentine’s Day (what could be more romantic than a song from the album “Take off your pants and jacket”).
Picking eighth notes at 193 bpm was very not in my abilities when I started this, I could get to maybe 160. I was up to 190 with a metronome and open string a bit ago, so almost there on the right hand part! The left hand part has like five total notes and almost all of them are played for an entire measure, so getting the right hand down is definitely the hard part.
Once you get that down you will be able to play like 80% of the Blink songs. Mark can play, but he likes to follow very similar patterns.
Not heard this - just googled - I assume you’re playing with a pick? I’d be freakin’ impressed if it was finger stylie…!
Absolutely with a pick, which is also how the original was played. I bet if I put in a little more effort I could get to 200 bpm eighth notes with three finger plucking. I’ll make that a future effort for learning a cannibal corpse cover.
