Lesson #1 Hello and welcome to Sight Reading For Bass Guitar & Acoustic Bass. Thanks so much for enrolling. I really appreciate it! I'm Cliff Engel, and I will be your instructor for this online bass course. Sight Reading For Bass is a beginner to intermediate level course that explores all aspects of reading and writing music notation for bassists. The ability to not only read but also write music notation is essential for any bass player who prepares music to be performed by other musicians. Following a clear analytical approach that begins by connecting the notes on the fingerboard to the notes on the staff, you will be presented with the standard guidelines of music notation, common note and rest values, articulation markings, intervals, triads, chords, and scales before moving onto more advanced rhythm studies. You will learn how to decipher key signatures, time signatures, and chord symbols as well as navigate lead sheets and chord charts. Utilizing a collection of complete transcriptions featuring classic and contemporary bass lines in rock, blues, jazz, motown, funk, latin, and classical styles, you will become a proficient reader of standard notation through real musical application. Alternate versions of selected exercises also include tablature to help verify your work and track your progress. From learning to recognize basic notes and elemental rhythms to understanding sophisticated signs, symbols, and terms, this course will help establish the foundation you need to more effectively communicate with other musicians in all your future musical endeavors. Whether your principle goal is to become a professional session bassist, a member of a college jazz ensemble, bass chair of a symphony orchestra, perform in a school musical, play in church, jam with some friends in your garage, or to simply increase the productivity of your practice sessions, improving your sight reading ability will only expand your opportunities as a working bassist. Musicians of all playing levels who are required to read or notate music in bass clef will benefit from this comprehensive course. In our first lesson, we need to establish a solid foundation from which all subsequent lesson material will be built upon in the future. In order to accomplish this, we need to be able to easily identify the notes on the fingerboard along with the notes on the staff in the bass clef. We will learn to recognize intervals. We will take a look at some techniques you can utilize for setting up your practice sessions, and we will also review a 3-step relative pitch ear training exercise that you can continue to use for the remainder of the course and beyond. Since we will be covering a substantial amount of information in a relatively short span of time, I want to mention that you should never feel overwhelmed with the depth of any of the lesson material. Some of the lesson material will probably seem rather basic for those who are more advanced players so it might take you just a few minutes to work through some of the exercises. However, other material will prove to be more time consuming, and I don't want you to feel like you need to have absolutely every exercise completely mastered in a single week because in some situations that would be impossible for anyone to accomplish regardless of their current playing ability. If certain components are relatively new for you, then it will just require more time and practice to master. The assimilation of all this information depends entirely on setting up effective practice sessions which I've outlined in great detail in "A Guide To Practicing." Before we examine any of the specific concepts outlined in "A Guide To Practicing," I want to mention a couple things in general to keep in mind when practicing. As you progress through this course, you will notice that I have included tablature with most of the exercises that I present to you in the lesson material. From a musical perspective, tablature by itself is completely useless because it isn't going to teach you anything about real music such as melody, harmony, or rhythm. However, tablature does facilitate in providing a good position reference to demonstrate how you could potentially play the exercises.
Without question, the single biggest rut that bassists fall into is that they rely too heavily on playing the instrument through the shapes or patterns specified in tablature. The design of a fretted bass guitar fingerboard and the placement of position markers such as dots and inlays also makes memorizing shapes or patterns very easy. You can certainly use shapes or patterns to help get started with learning things, but you don't want to rely on them too much. Try to always think of the fingerboard as an available pool of notes which you have the opportunity to utilize at any particular time. You don't want to just memorize the numbers indicated through tablature. You want to be aware of the notes that are associated with those numbers in the tablature. Memorizing the numbers or the shapes outlined in tablature isn't a very musical approach to playing any instrument. If you memorize just a small collection of shapes or patterns and then continue to revert to those same shapes and patterns over and over again, everything you play will tend to sound like everything else that you play. Rather than memorizing numbers or shapes, try to always be aware of the notes you are playing or are about to play. Although I usually notate the tablature in a way which makes the exercises the easiest to play, there are often times two or more other ways of playing the exercises depending on where you decide to shift from one note to the next so feel free to reposition your hand on the fingerboard if you feel more comfortable fingering a series of notes in a different fashion or if you have a preference as to how an exercise sounds when played in a particular register of the fingerboard. A Guide To Practicing One of the most essential, yet often overlooked, steps required to improve your skills as a musician is maintaining a consistent and productive practice regimen. Practicing is a highly underrated skill, and unfortunately, few instructors or method books ever mention the subject. Publications written for bassists may contain great collections of examples and exercises, but they generally don't advise you how to practice the material in an efficient manner. Practicing is nearly as much of an art as playing the bass. This guide to practicing will aid you in getting the most out of your practice time. You could be presented with the greatest lesson material ever written by anyone, but if you don't know how to practice that material effectively, then that information is going to be irrelevant. Ultimately, your goal when practicing is to internalize everything to a point that doesn't require much thought while playing. Eventually, you'll just hear something and play it, but to achieve that level of musicianship requires a significant amount of practice. To summarize a couple of the key concepts, first, try to practice every day of the week even if it is for a short span of time such as 20-30 minutes. You can get quite a bit accomplished in that short time frame as long as you are highly organized and know exactly what you need to practice. For comparison, I also want to mention what I wouldn't recommend doing. I don't recommend that you practice for an hour one day and then take two to three days off where you don't pick up your instrument at all. It is going to be very difficult to notice any kind of improvement in your playing on any level if you are only practicing periodically throughout the week due to the fact that you aren't reinforcing things through repetition. You need to have repetition in order to thoroughly internalize anything that you are practicing. That is why you will want to continually refresh your memory with content on a daily basis.
If you have four or five different components that you need to work on in a session and you have about an hour set aside in your daily schedule which is dedicated to practicing, then you will want to spend about 10-15 minutes practicing each of those components before moving on to the next. I don't recommend that you devote an entire practice session to working on only one component such as notes one day, just playing intervals the next day, or only ear training the day after that. You always need to have a certain degree of repetition in your practice sessions if you want to thoroughly internalize the material. Even if you practice on a daily basis but you continually skip practicing certain components, you won't be reinforcing the necessary repetition enough. With regard to using a metronome or drum machine during your practice sessions, I always recommend that you think through the specific fingerings and position shifts required by the exercises first before integrating any kind of timing device such as a metronome. If you begin working with a metronome or drum machine too soon, those tools will only distract you and force you to worry too much about timing rather than the exercise. Once you feel comfortable playing a musical passage without making a mistake, you can start using a metronome to help track your progress. Start as slow as you need to without causing yourself to make a mistake, and then increase the tempo incrementally from there. Never sacrifice accuracy for speed because you don't want to reinforce bad habits that will require time to fix in the future. When planning your practice sessions with the material from this lesson, you might consider spending about 15 minutes on each of the four primary subjects. For the first 15 minutes, work on ear training exercises. The next 15 minutes you can devote to reviewing the notes on your fingerboard followed by 15 minutes learning the notes on the staff using "A Guide To Notation." You can then use the remaining 15 minutes for practicing intervals. This is just an example of how you could potentially setup an hour-long practice session. Everyone will need to adjust accordingly depending on your current playing level. You might not need to devote a significant amount of time to reviewing the notes on the fingerboard or the bass clef if that is something you already understand very well. The Notes On 4, 5 & 6-String Basses "The Notes On 4, 5 & 6-String Basses" contains all of the note-based information that every bassist must have memorized in order to begin playing the instrument and start sight reading standard notation for bass including the positions of the notes on the fingerboard as indicated through the tablature as well as the notes on the staff in the bass clef. While many of you can already identify the positions of all the notes on the fingerboard, this will provide you with a valuable resource that you can always reference in the future if there is ever a question as to how the notes relate to each other on the fingerboard through the tablature or the location of any notes on the staff in the bass clef. When taking an analytical approach to sight reading and breaking standard notation down into its most fundamental elements, you are left with two primary components consisting of notes and rhythms. With regard to note recognition, you must have two pieces of note-based information committed to memory in order to begin reading standard notation for bass. - The position of the notes on the fingerboard - The notes on the staff in the bass clef Since there are only 12 unique pitches in the Western musical alphabet, memorizing their positions on the fingerboard of your instrument as well as on the staff in the bass clef is a relatively easy task. The much more challenging aspect of reading standard notation is experienced in learning to instantly recognize rhythms. Unlike notes where there are a relatively few number of them, the rhythmic possibilities you could be potentially presented with in a piece of standard notation are practically limitless.
Sight Reading For Bass Lesson #1 There are several different techniques you can utilize to memorize the positions of the notes on the fingerboard of your instrument. My favorite method for studying note recognition on the bass is memorizing individual notes, one at a time. For example, you can start by playing all of the E's in an ascending fashion on the fingerboard. Begin with the open E-string followed by the E at the 2nd fret of the D-string, the E at the 7th fret of the A-string, the E at the 9th fret of the G-string, the E at the 12th fret of the E-string, the E at the 14th fret of the D-string, the E at the 19th fret of the A-string, the E at the 21st fret of the G-string, and the E at the 24th fret of the E-string. You could also practice this exercise in reverse by starting with the note in the highest position on the fingerboard and descend to the lowest position. If you were locating all of the E's, you would start by playing the E at the 24th fret of the E-string and then shift to the 21st fret of the G-string followed by the 19th fret of the A-string and so on. Another variation of this exercise would include locating all of the same note on a single string such as beginning with the open E followed by the E's at the 12th and 24th frets of the E-string. The next day you would want to quickly recall the location of all the E's in order to reinforce the repetition that is required to thoroughly internalize their positions. After you complete that review, you could move on to a different note such as A. Follow the same basic practicing procedure for this exercise by starting with the lowest A available on the fingerboard, which would be the open A-string, and continue to ascend the fingerboard until you reach that note in the highest position available. If you focus your attention on memorizing the positions of just one note per day, in less than two weeks you will have committed all of the notes on the fingerboard to memory. The order in which you choose to study the notes on your fingerboard isn't significant, but it is important that you learn to expand your fretboard familiarity by being able to quickly identify the positions of all the notes across the entire range of the fingerboard. In addition to memorizing individual notes, some bassists prefer to learn notes over individual frets. You can memorize the notes over just one fret per day. On the first day, you could study the notes across only the 1st fret including F, Bb, Eb, and Ab, from low to high. The following day, you could work on the notes located at the 2nd fret and so on. If you have been playing bass for awhile and just need to fine tune your note recognition, you might consider working on larger segments of the fingerboard which span three to five-fret sections. You can start by reviewing the open strings up to the 3rd fret. During your next practice session, you could learn the notes from the 4th fret up to the 6th fret. In the practice session after that, you might study the notes between the 7th to the 9th frets and so forth in a similar fashion. You can also learn the notes on separate strings. You could begin by memorizing the notes from the open E up to the 12th fret of the E-string. In the next practice session, you might work on the notes from the open A up to the 12th fret of the A-string and so on. As you ascend the strings, you can spell the notes which require accidentals with sharps such as E-F-F#-G-G#, and use flats while descending including E-Eb-D-Db-C. If you choose to use this method for memorizing the positions of the notes, be careful that you don't just memorize the sequence of letters rather than their actual positions. Since the musical alphabet follows a repeating pattern of E-F-F#-G-G#-A-A#-B-C-C#-D-D#, going from the open E up to the 11th fret of the E-string, it is easy to memorize that sequence of notes while overlooking their actual location on the fingerboard. After you have a few of the intervallic shapes committed to memory such as a perfect octave and a perfect fifth, you can use those patterns to learn the notes relative to each other. For example, if you know that a perfect octave is played two strings over and two frets up from any note on the fingerboard, then you can easily identify the same note spaced an octave apart. Since the lowest G is located at the 3rd fret of the E-string, you can use the shape of a perfect octave to find the next highest G, two strings over and two frets up, at the 5th fret of the D-string. There are many variations of these note memorization techniques that you can experiment with in your practice sessions. You might try each of them for a few days, and then continue using the method that proves to be the most effective for you. Regardless of which technique you choose to practice, all of the notes repeat in the same sequence in the second octave so as soon as you reach the 12th fret, the musical alphabet starts over.
Sight Reading For Bass Lesson #1 Due to the design of a fretted bass guitar and the placement of position markers, it is very easy to visualize the positions of the notes on the fingerboard so you can continually review the location of the notes throughout the day without having a bass in your hands. Once you have the notes on your instrument as well as on the staff thoroughly internalized, the position of those notes will never change. The only thing about those notes that is going to change will be the function of those notes as they are applied to different chord types. A Guide To Notation Using a step-by-step approach that begins with pitch and then proceeds through pulse and meter, clefs, accidentals, enharmonic equivalents, and notation guidelines, the different variables bassists need to consider when reading and writing standard notation for bass are outlined in "A Guide To Notation." Intervals Intervals are the smallest melodic and harmonic units used in music. An interval is the distance between two pitches, and the ability to instantly recognize and spell intervals fluently is a useful skill for musicians to have mastered. Not only are intervals the fundamental building blocks of chords and scales, but they are also utilized extensively in bass line construction and solos. Although learning to play the intervals may not be that exciting to practice, being able to play all of the intervals, up and down, from any note on the fingerboard is an essential aspect of developing the technical foundation required to become a great improviser. As you commit the intervals to memory, you will want to be able to associate their names with specific shapes on the fingerboard and the staff. You will also want to internalize their respective sounds so that you can quickly identify them in the future. If you haven't dedicated much time to working on intervals prior to this lesson, I recommend that you break them down into smaller pieces by practicing one interval per day. Tablature has been provided with these examples to serve as a position reference in assisting you to easily memorize the shapes of these intervals on the fingerboard. Regardless of which note you start with, the relationship of these intervals to each other will remain constant so take these shapes and transpose them across the entire range of the fingerboard. Staff Paper Similar to how you learned to read and write a language at the same time as a child, musicians can enhance their ability to read music notation by learning how to write it because the writing process forces musicians to take a more active role and think about all of the various components contained within music notation such as the proper size of noteheads, stem direction and length, the placement of accidentals, and spacing considerations. I have included a collection of blank staff paper with this lesson that you can utilize for the remainder of the course. I recommend that you print these templates and devote a few minutes in each practice session to writing music notation. Depending on the subject being addressed in any particular lesson, you can notate individual notes, intervals, triads, chords, scales, and so forth. With practice, you will be able to notate advanced bass lines and solos over complete songs forms such as a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar A-A-B-A song form.
Ear Training - Intervals Since music is a hearing art, it is extremely important to possess a well-trained ear as a musician. With a finely-tuned relative pitch, you will be able to instantly recognize the quality of different chords, and by attaining a high degree of relative pitch, you will enhance your ability to improvise, transcribe, transpose, tune your instrument with greater precision, memorize music more easily, and perform with greater confidence. Ear training is also an important aspect of reading music notation because the best readers have the ability to view notation and know exactly what it sounds like before it is played. "Relative Pitch Ear Training" contains a very basic 3-step, relative pitch ear training exercise that you can apply to the intervals from this lesson, and you can begin by ear training the interval of a perfect fifth. On your bass, you can start this exercise on the note C at the 3rd fret of the A-string. Because we are practicing relative pitch, we will need to sound the note C at the 3rd fret of the A-string as a reference point. After you play the C, concentrate on its sound. Then, we will start this easy 3-step process: Step #1 - Imagine what the note you are going to sounds like in your mind. Step #2 - Sing that note. Step #3 - Play that note on your instrument. To further explain how to apply this 3-step exercise to the interval of a perfect fifth, play the note C at the 3rd fret of the A-string. Next, imagine what the note G, a perfect fifth higher, at the 5th fret of the D-string sounds like in your mind. Then, sing the note G out loud. Finally, play that G on your instrument in order to compare how you imagined and sang that note to what the note actually sounds like. After you complete this 3-step process going from the note C to the note G, repeat the same three steps, but start with the G and practice ear training a perfect fifth below to the note C. Begin by moving through exercises in a chromatic fashion. For example, apply this 3-step process to the interval of a perfect fifth between C and G. Then, employ it on the perfect fifth between C# and G# followed by the perfect fifth between D and A and so forth. Initially, we need to allow our ears to easily grasp the sounds of the basic intervals contained in the material we are ear training, but as your relative pitch improves, you can increase the degree of difficulty and force your ears to listen more deeply by moving about randomly on the fingerboard. Depending on your current ability to recognize intervals by ear before you start practicing this ear training exercise, you might consider working on a different interval every day if your ear is more advanced, or you may need to continue reviewing the same interval for an entire week or longer if you have never spent much time on ear training. I recommend that you start with the perfect intervals first including the perfect fifth, perfect fourth, and perfect octave before integrating all of the remaining major and minor intervals. You can also use familiar melodies to assist in identifying intervals. For example, the first two notes of "Here Comes The Bride" are a perfect fourth. "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" begins with a major sixth, and the music in the movie Jaws makes extensive use of a minor second. As you listen to your favorite music, try to find a melody that is easy to remember which will help you recall the sounds of the different intervals. In addition to the intervals, you can continue to apply this relative pitch ear training exercise to practically everything you play on your instrument including triads, seventh chords, scales, and more. This concludes our first lesson. Please let me know if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing from you and receiving your feedback. In the next lesson, we will study triads. We will learn note and rest values as well as the most common signs and terms found in music notation. We will also start working through a series of note and rhythmic recognition exercises.