THE HOW TO PLAY BASS MONTHLY EZINE - … | Free How To Play Bass Monthly Ezine | August 2014 | how-to-play-bass.com Now the verse that follows is comprised almost entirely of the same

2 | Free How To Play Bass Monthly Ezine | August 2014 | how-to-play-bass.com

THE HOW TO PLAY BASS MONTHLY EZINE - AUGUST 2014

Welcome to the free how to play bass monthly ezine for August, 2014. In this month’s issue I’m going to feature a tutorial that will give you an example of what I call a ‘working bass line.’

That song is the classic blues-rock song Feelin’ Alright as played by Joe Cocker. Now there are TWO Joe Cocker versions that you can listen to - there’s the original studio version on the album WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS where the bass was played by Carole Kaye.

Or there’s the version that this tutorial is based on that was featured on the MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN album - and Carl Radle provided bass duties on that one.

I’ve collected 50 working bass lines into a stand alone product - you can find more details here:

http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/working-basslines-vol1.html

To summarize, each of the 50 tutorials contain the following:

1. Transcription of the main parts in notation and tab2. Video tutorial3. Bass less backing track (missing from this lesson)4. Instructions on how to create the main sections of the song in the PG Music program Band In A Box. These instructions include key, tempo, style and chord guides. You’ll see this section at the end of the ‘Feelin Alright’ part of the monthly ezine.

Learn Songs Not Scales

We’ve got the next segment in my serialized book “Learn Songs Not Scales.” In this segment we’re talking about using songs to create learn-ing sequences.

Once the remaining segments of the book have been serialized, I’ll

http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/working-basslines-vol1.html


put the parts together and it will become a standalone book.

Have a great month!

Paul Wolfewww.how-to-play-bass.comLondon


WORKING BASSLINE TUTORIAL - FEELING ALRIGHT by JOE COCK-ER

This month we’re looking at the basic parts of the tune Feeling Al-right - which was made famous by Joe Cocker.

This is one of those tunes with hardly any chords - there are just three! And I’ve included Feeling Alright for three reasons:

There are two versions that Joe Cocker has recorded - this version is based on the live recording on the 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishman tour where the bass was played by Carl Radle.

Carol Kaye played on Cocker’s first version of this tune - on the 1967 al-bum With A Little Help From My Friends. There’s some interesting stuff on that that’s worth transcribing it for.


Now the verse that follows is comprised almost entirely of the same notes and the same rhythms. But to differentiate it from the chorus the bass player on the Mad Dogs And Englishman live album uses shorter note durations (that’s Carl Radle by the way).

Here’s the kind of thing that he’s playing:


Now there’s room for more variations in different sections - but you have to be careful not to throw in so many variations that you loose the feel of the groove.

So this tutorial is a good exercise in getting to grips with 16th note bass lines. And I don’t recommend varying too much from the parts I’ve writ-ten out. There is an interesting David Ruffin version of this tune out there too with a nice bass line by Jamerson. At some stage I may transcribe that and add it to my collection of Jamerson lines. The original version - by Traffic - has got some interesting variations on it too and is worth check-ing out.


How To Program The Sections In Band In A Box

There’s a bass less backing track to practice along with on the Issue 241 page - but if you want to program and isolate the sections in Band In A Box (and play with the tempos) here’s what to do:

1. Set key to C.2. Aim for performance tempo to be around 90 BPM3. Choose a style for practice. I chose the 60s. Soul Band.4. Mute the bass

Here’s the repetitive chord progression that you need to program:


LEARN SONGS NOT SCALES 7

In today’s column we’re going to start looking at one of the ways you can start to learn the bass by learning songs and not scales. In this section we’re going to look at creating sequences.

What Is A Learning Sequence?

Whether you know it or not - and whether they are called ‘learning se-quences’ or not - you were exposed to these ideas at school.

When you learn to read you start by spelling individual letters phoneti-cally.

So “CAT” becomes this sound: Cuh, ahh, t.And then you learn to speak the individual sounds together: “Cuh-ahh-t.” Cat.

As well as learning the sound of all the letters, you start to learn to recog-nize the ‘shape’ that combinations of letters make. So soon you no lon-ger see ‘CAT’ at “Cuh-ahh-t” but you see it as one word: Cat.

Of course you will be introduced to more advanced vocabulary and words, and longer words, and so on. And then when you go from pre-school to school you’ll move on to learning the classifications of words - e.g. nouns, verbs, etc - and the learning moves on.

But that in a nutshell is a learning sequence.

My youngest son goes to a kick boxing martial arts class every week and took his black belt for the youngest level (5 years old to 8 years old) last week. Because he was taking his black belt I was allowed to sit in and watch - and what I saw was a learning sequence spelt out backwards.

Max was the only child going for black belt, so he started. And the in-structor took him through his black belt drills. Then three children go-ing for Brown belt joined him on the dojo mat - he moved backwards - and all four children went through the blue belt syllabus with the


instructor.

Then the would be Blue belts went to the front of the dojo mat, and Max and the three wannabe brown belts moved backwards, and then the in-structor took them all through the blue belt syllabus.

And this continued right down to the aspiring yellow belts.

Now flip this around and you have a short routines of blocks and jabs that you need to do with either hand to get to yellow belt. Add in some basic side kicks and more involved blocks and you get to the next belt (Orange I think). And to progress to each level the students have to practice and learn more and harder kicks, jabs, punches and blocks in various combinations.

That’s a learning sequence.

How To Construct A Learning Sequence

So how do you construct a learning sequence?

Well what you have to do is first define where you currently are and where you trying to get to.

Then you start out with material that takes you just beyond where you currently are. And master that. And then that becomes your new start-ing point. In the martial arts analogy you’ve just moved from white belt (newbie) to yellow belt.

And now with the new starting point of yellow belt, you add learning material that takes you from yellow belt to orange belt. And so on.

Again, the martial arts analogy is really helpful - because the skills that you need to master to get to yellow belt are necessary to create the foun-dation that will help you get to the higher belts.

Caveat - it sounds like creating a learning sequence is simple. Learning sequences are simple - but creating them isn’t. If you’re a relative


beginner at something the chances of you being able to create a good learning sequence for yourself are slim.

So learning sequences are something that you may need help with de-pending on what level you are at. The more advanced you are, the more likely that you can identify and create your own learning sequences.

How To Use Songs In A Learning Sequence

In teaching the bass I try and focus just about every piece of my teach-ing through the lens of bass lines to songs. Whether that’s the perfor-mances of the masters we admire - or bass lines to songs that we create, it doesn’t matter.

But bass lines to songs are what we have to play when we go out into the real world - so it makes sense to try and duplicate that experience in our practice space.

Now creating a learning sequence with songs depends on you knowing where you are when you start out, and where you want to be when you finish.

What you need to do is audit what skills you need to acquire to get from your start point to your end point. And then you can split that into stag-es (think yellow belt, orange belt, green belt etc). Then you match up songs to each stage - if you get your sequence right, then the learning of that song sequence should take you from start to finish.

Now written down like that it sounds easy. But as I said above you may need the help of more advanced players to complete your song se-quence.

Sidebar: I mentioned earlier in this series of columns that there is a classical music instruction method that does this called The Suzuki Method. The Suzuki method is a really interesting way of learning an in-strument - it’s been used since before the bass was invented and Suzuki schools have sprung up all over the world and more importantly, turned out world class concert level pianists and violinists. (Recently the Suzuki Method has spread to other instruments - even the upright bass!)


One Caveat For Advanced Users

The Suzuki Method - and to some extent my own ‘bass for beginners’ course - were designed to be a learning sequence to take the player from newbie level to a reasonable level of proficiency.

But when you get more advanced, you might want to be working on a specific technique (and we’ll see more on this in the next section next week too). When you construct your learning sequence you might find a song that’s great for the technique or device that you’re working on - but that it’s only used in part of the song.

If that’s the case then unless transitioning from the parts of the song you don’t need to the part of the song you DO need is important, make sure that your practice time isn’t taken up with repetitions of the part of the song you don’t need. So don’t be afraid in these situations of isolating small sections of a song and really focusing on those. For example, let’s say you are working on fills. And a fill occurs at transi-tions from verse to choruses. Or choruses to bridges. And so on. Rather than playing through 16 bars of a verse to get to the fill, program a 4 bar section in band in a box, plus a ‘stop’ on the 1 of the next bar and prac-tice that. And loop that section over and over. That way you get to prac-tice your fill 4 times for every once you’d practice it if you played through the 16 bar verse in its entirety.

We’ll take this up more in the next column when we look at using songs to improve your playing technique!

12 | Free How To Play Bass Monthly Ezine | June 2014 | how-to-play-bass.com

FIRST BASS AND BEYOND - THE ULTIMATE SONG RESOURCE FOR BEGINNER AND INTERMEDIATE BASS PLAYERS

If you’ve read this far it shows that you’re interested in detailed song tu-torials for bass. How would you like to get access to over 200 song tutori-als over the next year for less than a dollar a tutorial? Well First Bass And Beyond gives you that....

Here’s how it works.

First Bass And Beyond is based on a magazine model and I publish a PDF like this one every Friday at 5pm GMT. Each magazine includes two song tutorials in the PDF that are complemented with video tutori-als and MP3s as well.

I publish 50 issues a year - so that’s 100 song tutorials over the next year.

Additionally there is a section of the website called Working Bass Lines - and new members will get a new song every week in that section of the website. That takes you up to 150 song tutorials in the next year. (See list at the end of this PDF)

When you join you get access to the archive of the free How To Play Bass monthly ezine - there are currently 35 videos in that archive. That’s 185 song tutorials. (These 35 tutorials are all immediately available - and to see what songs are available, see the list at the end of the PDF)

When you join you also get access to the Bass For Beginners course which currently includes another 35 song tutorials - that makes 220 song tutorials. (And these 35 tutorials are available immediately).

Plus if you subscribe as an annual member you get 10 back issues of the magazine as a bonus - that could potentially add another 20 song tutori-als to your song tutorial library!

There’s more in the magazine too - a main transcription every week that is usually more advanced and doesn’t have video to go with. Plus there’s

13 | Free How To Play Bass Monthly Ezine | June 2014 | how-to-play-bass.com

a theory column for bass players taught from the perspective of the bass player’s role in a band playing songs. And there’s currently a columnon creating bass lines from chord symbols. We’ll shortly be running a series where we deconstruct Tommy Shannon’s bass playing too.

All this costs either $57 for a quarter or $187 for a year. BUT THE PRICES ARE GOING UP ON MONDAY, 20th OCTOBER.

http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/first-bass-and-beyond.html

Contact

If you’ve got any other questions don’t hesitate to email me via the con-tact form on the website.

Have a great month, and enjoy.

Paul

http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/first-bass-and-beyond.html

Documents

THE HOW TO PLAY BASS MONTHLY EZINE - … | Free How To Play Bass Monthly Ezine | August 2014 | how-to-play-bass.com Now the verse that follows is comprised almost entirely of the same