Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Online Bass Lessons: Improve Quicker Without Moving From Your Home

By Daniel Caldwell

Playing the guitar is one popular pastime nowadays. For some people, it is also a way of expressing themselves and elevates the hobby into an art form or sometimes, science. Playing the guitar, however, is no joke. It requires a lot of patience and practice. For some people, they would rather study playing the bass guitar than the regular guitar. Here are some tips on learning to play the bass guitar.

Take a regular guitar (which is tuned from the thickest to the lowest string- E - A - D - G - B - E) and exclude the two thinnest strings at the bottom and what is left is basically a bass guitar with thinner strings. Bass playing is usually note-oriented and not chord-oriented. This means that single notes are hit more often in bass playing and this scheme is the essential element of bass playing, one should be familiar with the tunings and the notes in a regular guitar to be able to decently play the bass guitar.

Whatever your reasons, you want to learn how to play bass. You don't have to go to music school to do this. You can take online bass guitar lessons. You don't even need a bass guitar to start out with. Any acoustic guitar will do, since the top four strings of any guitar are the four strings of a bass guitar. What you learn on an acoustic guitar you can then transfer to bass.

A simpler setup would be to connect your bass guitar to the input of a direct injection box, which offers a different, rounder character compared to the crisp sound that you get from micing up a bass amplifier. There are a multitude of active and passive DI boxes to choose from, so try them out at the local guitar shop to see which one appeals to you the most.

It can be played by plucking, slapping, tapping, popping, or by picking the strings with a pick. The bass guitar looks somewhat similar to an electric guitar, but with a larger, heavier body, a longer scale length, and a longer neck. The bass guitar usually has four strings, tuned one octave lower in pitch than the four lower strings of a guitar.

It is clearly not enough to know how to play your favorite instrument; you should always be looking to find new techniques and ways of playing. Learn blues bass guitar and rock the house. You may prefer a particular style of music over many others and when you begin learning a new instrument but perhaps over time, you will develop a fondness for other styles or genres.

The next link in the chain would be the choice of bass guitar. A $10 flea market bought bass would sound radically different from a $1000 Warwick, so choose which one suits the music wisely. Choice of strings (roundwound, flatwound, etc) also influences the resulting sound and character of the bass, as well as its behavior in interacting with the bassist's fingers.

Learning your bass patterns from alternate views of music theory and fretboard theory will result in a large impact on your bass playing skill, which is what being a great bass player is all about. For example traditional patterns, modern patterns, in position and out of position patterns need to be an integral part of your bass lessons.

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