Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Online Bass Guitar Lessons: Warming Up


Too often bassists forget to warm up before starting their online bass guitar lessons. If you want to learn how to play bass guitar, you need to learn how to warm up. All your life you have been warming up before you start running, well, you need to do the same when learning how to play bass guitar.

Let's start warming up by playing the A string on your bass guitar. If you have a metronome, I like to set it to 100-110 to start the rhythm. Resting you thumb on the E string, play the open A string with your index finger. Play the A string on each beat of the metronome.

Once you start getting the rhythm down, play the first fret of the A string with your index finger. Then, play the second fret with your middle finger. Then play the third fret with your ring finger. Then, play the fourth fret with your pinky finger. Keep playing the first, second, third and fourth fret with the rhythm of the metronome. Once you feel comfortable with this, shift your entire left hand down the neck and play the second fret, third fret, fourth fret and fifth fret.

Keep doing this all of the way up the neck of your bass guitar. This is a great warm up for your online bass guitar lessons. If you want to learn how to play bass guitar, practicing this warm up exercise will help you with your fingering.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Bass Guitar Tabs

One of the easiest ways to learn how to play the bass guitar is to learn bass guitar tabs. When learning how to play bass guitar, a lot of beginner bass players have a hard time reading music. Bass guitar tabs make allow you to focus on learning how to play bass guitar and not worry about reading music.

The Internet is a great source of bass guitar tabs. You can find easy bass guitar tabs that you can use to learn how to play the bass guitar. Bass guitar show you which fret to put your finger on which string.

Tabs is an abbreviation for tabulature. It is an visualization of the sheet music. Tabs allow you to easily see which notes to play even if you can't read music. I can read music, but still love to use tabs.

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

How to Play Bass Guitar Lesson 3: Listen to the Masters

One of the best ways to stay focused and dedicated to the process of learning how to play bass guitar is to listen to some masters of the instrument. One of my favorite bassists is Metallica's Jason Newsted. Watch and listen to this awesome bass solo. This is how to play bass guitar.



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How to Play Bass Guitar Lesson 2: Anatomy of a Bass Guitar

For your second lesson on how to play bass guitar, I thought that it would be good for me to describe the anatomy of a bass guitar.

Let's start at the top.

Headstock - the top of the guitar, which contains the tuning keys and machine heads.
Tuning Keys- the bass guitar typically contains four tuning key, one key to tune each string.
Machine Heads - the posts on the headstock that the strings are wrapped around.
Neck - the part of the fretboard that is closest to the headstock.
Fret - the neck is comprised of many frets which you place your fingers on to change the sound of a string.
Dot Position Inlays - these help the bassist know where he needs to put his fingers to play specific notes. They are a quick visual to allow the bassist to know where he is on the fretboard.
Pickguard - a extra protected area on the body of the bass guitar to prevent the bassist from scratching the bass guitar.
Pickups - the area of the guitar that gathers the sound coming from the strings so that the amplifier can play the sound.
Bridge - the area of the guitar where the strings terminate.

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Tuning - How to Play Bass Guitar Lesson


When learning how to play bass guitar, one of the first things to learn is how to tune your bass guitar. The method that I will teach you is the relative tuning method where you will learn to tune the bass guitar to sound in tune with itself.

Step 1: Tuning the 4th String

The first step is for you to tune the 4th string, the lowest sounding string and the thickest one. When no fingers are placed on the fret board, the 4th string plays the note E. Find the E key on you piano or on your tuning tool and try to match the sound of the 4th string to the E note. You can raise or lower the pitch of the 4th string by turning the tuning peg associated with the 4th string. One tip for getting the key in tune is to listen for the sounds to collide. When a notes are not in tune, you will hear them collide. As you get closer to being in tune the notes will take longer to collide.

Step 2: Tuning the 3rd String

After the 4th string is in tune, it is time to tune the 3rd string. Start by holding down the 5th fret on the 4th string. Then follow the tuning instructions in step one until the 3rd string sounds in tune with the note played by holding down the 5th fret on the 4th string (A).

Step 3: Tuning the 2nd String

Follow the steps for step 2 except use the note created by holding down the 5th fret on the 3rd string (D).

Step 4 Tuning the 1st String

Follow the steps for step 2 except use the note created by holding down the 5th fret on the 2nd string (G).

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Monday, August 20, 2007

How to Play Bass Guitar With Flea

Learn how to play bass guitar with one of my favorite bassists, Flea from the Red Hot Chile Peppers. I love surfing the net to find cool bass lessons. Youtube has become one of the best places to find bass guitar videos and other videos to teach you how to play bass guitar.

In the video below, Flea jams away with some of the coolest bass rifts of all time. For those of us wanting to learn how to play bass guitar, watching Flea is very inspirational. Tell me what you think of this.



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