www.howtolearnbass.com

What do you want to get out of learning the bass? What is your ultimate objective? How will you know when you have achieved it?

To answer these questions you must set yourself goals.

Try to be as concrete as possible with these goals. “To be a better player” is too abstract. “To learn the whole bass line for ‘Whole Lotta Love’ ” is better.

First set your ultimate goal - how far do you want to take playing? To be a professional band member or session musician? To play for a local band?

You can then break down the main goal in to sub-goals. What skills will you have to have to achieve your master goal? Each skill needed will be a sub-goal.

Your sub-goals can then be broken down into sub-sub-goals and further until you have a roadmap to follow to get to your objective.

If you are learning from a teacher or a course make the daily or weekly lesson your most immediate goal and keep at it until you have achieved it.

Write your goals down and read and review them each day. By writing them down you move them from being just thoughts to real goals and motivate yourself to make progress towards achieving them.

As I’ve just added a review on the bass I picked to start with I thought I’d give my own personal views on this subject.

Firstly and most importantly - if it’s at all possible try the bass out personally. This way you will know the feel and weight of the instrument and any possible faults. If you are a beginner try to take along a more experienced friend to help you. You will be spending many hours with your instrument so it’s vital you know how you will get on with it from the start.

Also try to play as many different models and makes as possible - if you have any friends that play they can help you out here. This will give you an idea of what type of bass suits you best. I generally like the smaller headless instruments as I think I’m quite clumsy but if you read the review here you can see I went in a completely different direction this time.

Try to include enough in your budget for a hard case. This will make it much easier to move about with and protect it from knocks. Once you start gigging or playing at friend’s houses you will see the wisdom here.

Get the most basic instrument that will get the job done. This should be a 4 or 5 string as anything more will confuse you to learn on. You can go for a more exotic variant later and will be able to make a better choice.

	Vintage BASS GUITAR Model NB-4. M.I.J. RARE Headstock

	
US $95.00 (1 Bid)
 End Date: Wednesday Feb-10-2010 15:48:50 PST
Bid now | Add to watch list

	1975 Guild JSII bass guitar - Oak leaf carving - Look!

	
US $749.00 (3 Bids)
 End Date: Wednesday Feb-10-2010 11:00:10 PST
Bid now | Add to watch list

	Vintage FENDER Musicmaster Bass guitar AMPLIFIER.

	
US $159.00 (1 Bid)
 End Date: Wednesday Feb-10-2010 10:46:52 PST
Bid now | Add to watch list

	Stunning custom bass guitar handmade by master luthier

	
US $250.00 (1 Bid)
 End Date: Wednesday Feb-10-2010 10:01:50 PST
Bid now | Add to watch list

	The Beatles Rock Band PS3 Hofner Bass Guitar Controller

	
US $76.00 (13 Bids)
 End Date: Friday Feb-12-2010 9:49:28 PST
Bid now | Add to watch list

So from this you can see I ignored all the above in my selection but as the outlay was fairly modest I gambled a bit and it paid off. The more money you are thinking of parting with the more closely you should stick to the above guidelines.

This is my blog exploring how to learn bass guitar after some time away from playing the electric. I have been playing standard 6 string electric guitars for many years but not really getting anywhere. After stopping playing altogether for a while I decided to start over with the bass to give me a fresh perspective and to try to avoid the bad habits and attitudes that had crept in my playing.

I’ve never been much of an acoustic guitar fan - except 12 string so have mostly owned and played electric. Over the years I have been able to get better and better instruments and even a double neck (which was a big mistake but great to look at!) I finally ended up with two of the best instruments I have ever played but for some reason the desire had gone and they sat around gathering dust.

Something had to be done and a couple of coincidences gave me the idea of trying the bass this time. I had considered getting a Chapman stick or other touch instrument but these were well out of my means so I decided on getting the best value bass I could and see how I got on.

In how to learn bass I will chart my successes and failures along the way so you can hopefully learn from my mistakes and not repeat them. I will also give you what I know to be essential practice techniques even though I may not follow them myself (do as I say not as I do!).

I will post on future topics such as:

• set your goals
• how to learn
• choosing a bass
• tuning up
• getting started
• essential but boring bits
• good practice habits
• bad practice habits
• picking out a tune by ear

I hope that the decipline of producing regular articles for how to learn bass will help me to practice more regularly than I do at present (bad habit No. 1) and give you some practice ideas as well.