The Music Instrument Store

Slap Bass: The Ultimate Guide

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Retail Price: $19.95

Amazon Price: $11.54

by Stacy Williams

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.

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.

There is little that proves more daunting for young bass players than realizing just how physically demanding it is to play bass. As novices watching our favorite bassists on video we think, “That doesn’t look so hard! I can do that!”

For instance, you’ve already heard about “slap bass” for sure. Slap is a very common technique and, because of the use in rock situation it has became one of the most popular technique in bass playing nowadays.

Besides, this will give you a chance to expand your instrument sound range, giving it more depth and compression. There are different variations of slapping the string. Slap bass techniques are commonly found in all types of music, but most notably in the funk, Latin and pop styles.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be harder than it looks. Here’s why: The muscles that move your hands and fingers across the neck and strings are rarely used for other tasks. The fine motor skills needed to play a stringed instrument require that the small muscles of the hands be strengthened. So when you take up the bass, you’re like a baby learning to walk: Not only do you have no idea of what you’re doing, you don’t even have the muscles to do it.

Imagine a scarecrow in a corn field – that is how your arm should be bent. With your arm bent in this position it will allow your hand to be in the perfect position to allow your wrist to move freely to strike the strings.

With all this is in mind, now you should start for taking your lessons. It don’t matter if you hire a private teacher, learn by yourself or get some online lessons, whatever works for you will be the right path to take if you’re just beginning.

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