The double bass used to be the instrument that kept the beat in the band. But that changed in the middle of the twentieth century when electricity took over everybody’s job. They still use acoustic instruments in classical orchestras but rock and roll came on the scene at the same time as modern art and labor saving devices. Modern music joined modern art in the search for new ways to express feelings. A whole family of electric guitars had arrived on the doorstep of the music loving public and we invited them in to stay.
Just in case you don’t listen too closely to music, the bass guitar gives the music those heavy, low notes. You’ll find them in jazz, blues, pop, latin. There isn’t a modern musical genre where you won’t find bass lines churned out by the electric bass guitar. Every musical style has its own way of interpreting bass lines.
Sometimes a guy will take up the guitar, learn some rock and some blues. He’ll learn the minor pentatonic scale, buy some guitar effects and see how they sound. Then he tries bass guitar. A guitar player who decides to learn to play bass is often a guy who wants to get a good grounding in music. He wants to learn all aspects of playing. Once a guitar player has played a little bass he will have a better understanding of what he’s doing in a band.
Of course, a bass guitar looks a lot like a regular electric guitar. It might even have the same number of strings but mostly it has four. The strings on a four string bass play the notes E A D G, the same as a regular guitar but an octave lower. You can play a regular electric guitar without an amplifier and it will still sound somewhat like a guitar. If you don’t plug your bass guitar in it won’t sound like much. If you can read music you will notice that the bass lines are written in the bass clef only one octave higher than the notes it actually makes.
If you can already play an electric guitar and you want to learn bass you have a start already but only time will tell how good you are going to be at being a bass player in a band. Your talents could lie in the direction of lead or rhythm playing, but if you give bass guitar playing a try, you will not be worse off for the experience.
If you have an interest in learning to play bass guitar, you will find it to be a very rewarding instrument to play. The bass guitar player is an important member of the band. The quality of the group’s playing depends largely on how well the bass player keeps in time. Not only are the demands heavy but the rewards are great. It only takes a short time to get up and running as a bass guitarist and once you have learnt a few basic bass lines and worked out whether you are a plectrum player or a plucker, you will be able to start improvising your own bass licks.
There are two ways to learn bass online. One is to take advantage of the many free bass lessons on the web. These online bass guitar lessons will help you to understand how the place of the bass guitar in a band, music theory, reading sheet music and tabs as well as giving you basic rhythms to play. Some of the bass lessons you find will have some kind of interactive component where you can play along with riffs or a backing track.
Of course, many of the bass guitar lesson sites are offering paid courses, but there are also some good free lessons. If you do a search for “online bass guitar lessons” (without the quotes will give you more results) you will be able to compare the various paid lesson courses for bass guitarists, and you will get a chance to compare them with the free courses. If you decide to learn to play bass guitar for free you will probably need to find yourself some free bass guitar tabs on the internet. There are many places that offer bass tabs for popular songs. Another option for the bass guitar student on a budget is YouTube. If you go looking for online bass lessons on video you will probably find about a thousand clips, all offering something of value to the beginner.
As a bass player you must learn to play in time. A newbie guitar player can spend years playing guitar with the tempo and timing all over the place because he does not have to play with other musicians. The bass guitarist’s job is to play in a band so the sooner you get any little rhythmic or timing peccadillos ironed out, the better. For this you will need a metronome. Type “free metronome” into a search engine, find one you like and bookmark it if it is online, although there are metronomes you can download for free. The same goes for a tuner. There are quite good bass guitar tuners online. You will also be able to find free backing tracks for guitar online. Playing along to these is a great way to get the feel of playing in a band. You can tell the program what chords to play and the time signature, and you can play along to the looped track online or download it in mp3 format. For more inspiration find video clips and mp3′s by leading bass guitar players like Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, Waylon Tisdale, John Pattitucci, Mike Mason or Miroslav Vitous.