Well I had an “Ah Hah” moment today and it wasn’t pleasant. I took all my covers and made an audio cd and put it in my car to listen while I’m driving. That my sound a bit narcissistic but I did it to track my progress and for self-evaluation. My Ah Hah moment came when I realized that I suck at mixing audio. The gain for the baseline was all over the place, some pounding the car, some barely audible. I need some lessons on mixology.
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I guess Warren’s guide will be handy.
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Don’t dispair @JerryP it comes with trial and error and a lot of learning
Keep in mind, YouTube and Vimeo normalize all audio tracks that you upload so you probably didn’t notice. I always put my final track on my cell phone and listen to it on the car stereo before I consider it complete.
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According to your observation of ….
We know that …
isn’t true anymore!
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That is so true because you recognised a problem without it being pointed out to you.
Very good point @DaveT 
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Right?
The real good ones are rarely pleasant in the moment.
…Like when my college professor took the bass out of my hands mid-song so he could teach me (in front of the improv. ensemble) how to play a ballad.
Ah hah!
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Well, another one from the “how the f did this take me 1.5 years” section: I’ve just realized that I can play all of the diatonic triads of the major scale on the same 4 frets by utilising the “other” major and minor shapes as well, not just the “default” ones I initially learned.
Up until now I’ve only been using the middle-index-pinky shape for major, and the index-pinky-ring for minor (because that’s how you play them when practicing scales). This required me to move up and down the neck quite a lot when playing triads. But by adding the pinky-ring-index for major and pinky-middle-index for minor, I can stay on the same 4 frets the entire time.
And I can already see how inversions are going to come in handy for the minor scale, but this was enough ah-hah for me for one day.
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One of the nice things about Mark Smith’s Chord Tones course is he goes through a lot of different triad fingerings and strategies for when moving up and down the neck. One of the things I got out of the course, anyway.
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He talks about that quite a bit in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGFCyomtJdg
That’s the most I’ve ever heard Mark just talk about stuff 
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I always suggest to people that they learn the major and minor scales starting on the index, middle and pinky fingers.
It was cool when I discovered that if you start a major scale on your pinky, your index finger will land on the relative minor (assuming on finger per fret),
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This is a lot of what Rich Brown is doing with M/m scales, pentatonics and inversions, and teaching inversion patterns on different parts of the neck. It’s a pretty cool approach then ends up with a lot of cool exercises to warm up with etc. as well.
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there’s also the Gary Willis book “Fingerboard Harmony for Bass” which is apparently similar to the SBL fretboard accelerator course.
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Hey there,
since the other thread came up, I’m adding my ah-ha moments here:
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All of the 12 notes are on the A-string, in alphabetical order. You can play anything in that range.
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At one point, I realized that bass guitar is simply “slower” relative to other instruments. Sure, you can shred at ridiculous speeds, but take an instrument like drums, it can divide beats faster.
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I noticed the vibration of the bass body against myself one day. Now I feel the instrument and it’s like a cat purring, a comfortable childhood memory.
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I actually enjoy practicing nowadays because the “do it slow, it will help you go fast” thing that many of you have mentioned clicked.
Cheers,
Antonio
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I love this.
My upright teacher made me sit in front of the big upright as he played it and put my hands up to the f-holes while he bowed big low notes.
I could feel the air coming out.
“We push air. That’s our job.” That’s what he told me.
Feeling bass notes is profound.
I think that’s why I still crave everything at huge, high volumes. I want to feel it.
Although… to a point. I had to leave a Snoop Dogg concert because I could feel the bass rearranging my bodies parts in terrible ways.
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Since this thread was pointed out to me, I realized that the thread I started is really for something else than “ah hah” moments. But, I have had many “ah hah” moments, and I can share a couple.
- when I learned that I can tune using harmonics and I get a better result than trying the standard tuning to a whole note.
- I took jazz guitar lessons for a couple of months to gain dexterity, when I learned that my hand does not need to be resting anywhere to play a string, I experienced freedom.
- I was playing a bass line in a studio and the sound engineer asked if we could try a different setting on my bass to get a crisper tone. I faked a knob turn and then moved my hand down towards the bridge to play the line. He loved it. That’s when I realized that I could do that during live gigs for different reasons.
- Right after buying my first bass, I discovered that if I played uniformly around and/or on the “dots” of the fretboard I could play tons of stuff that sounded okay with whatever song I was trying to learn. If I happened to hit something that didn’t sound right, I would simply slide up or down, then I would repeat that same pattern one more time and it sounded like it was on purpose. I think this single “ah hah” moment is what enabled me to jam with people and why jam sessions always felt so creative to me.
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Yeah… I have relatively annoying tinnitus for similar reasons.
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This was how KMFDM was.
Loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
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It’s actually a thing.
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That’s called “the producer switch” 
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WHAT?! OMG, I just watched the video and now I feel like and idiot. Well, maybe worse… I feel like an old idiot that did not know any of that before I watched it… /me sleep now
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