Online Bass Lessons: Design Your Own Music Program

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.

Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.

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.

The standard tuning of a four string bass guitar from highest (thinnest string) to lowest (fattest string) is G-D-A-E. On a five string bass the tunings are similar with the addition of a low B string. On a six string bass guitar, a thinner (higher pitched) string is added, and is tuned to C, In other words on a 6 string bass guitar the settings are B-E-A-D-G-C, where B is the fattest string or lowest note and C the highest and thinnest.

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.

In struggling simply to get out the notes, though, it’s easy to neglect developing these small muscles. The result can be a great deal of wasted energy and motion, limiting one’s technique. So here are some of the do’s and don’t's of hand position (the advice here is for righties; if you’re left-handed, adjust accordingly):

Also, crucial to slap bass is the “snapping” sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard – this is called “popping”. Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics – but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.

A bass guitarist/bassist is like the anchor of a band. He/she outlines the harmony of the music being performed, while simultaneously indicating the rhythmic pulse of it. The bass guitarist is like the lifeblood of any band, and the bass guitar is his/her tool of choice, used to mesmerize audiences. A bass guitar is a bass stringed instrument that is played with the fingers.