Bass Lessons: Week 0, Preamble

It begins again.

I keep trying to take music lessons or classes over and over and not being able to stick it out over and over. This has been been true the length of my musical experience except in those times when I was forced to take lessons by parents.

I'm not sure if I have an inability to stick with structured activities or if I don't like being helped by others or what. But it is chronic.

I met a gal at GRC who seemed personable enough, and so I'm going to take a few bass lessons from her and see how it goes.

I'm not entirely sure what I want out of lessons.


I think that I learn best when I have things written out in tab + hear a recording and/or see a video/person playing it. I feel like I'm kind of a slow learner. I tend to take things away to a dark corner and mull and fiddle and eventually get it...but in lessons (mostly with respect to drums since I've not taken many bass lessons) I've often had a sort of performance anxiety. The teacher will say...do this...and then I have to figure it out right there on the spot, which freaks me out...and then whatever we did usually isn't written down or recorded so I can't refer to it later and practice. So I get discouraged.
What I'd like going forward is to feel like I can hold my own in your average kind of rock band. Like I could answer a Craigslist ad for a bass player and not be laughed out of the room. Nothing fancy, but maybe a bit more than the root note based stuff I've always fallen back on. I'd like to be able to write simple but effective parts for original songs...and be able to work out more songs by ear and not need the tab hints so much.

I've recently just begun to teach myself a bit about playing "in the box" and I sit down and jam with friends who write originals once in a while. I feel like that's helping and I'd like to build on that ability to write complimentary bass parts. I think that I understand scales and the theory behind them...but I don't have that stuff memorized or well applied to the fingerboard. And all of that theory feels overwhelming.

So we'll see how it goes.

I feel like my potential on the bass is greater than my potential on drums. It comes more easily to me and is more fun for that reason. It's also a lower profile job than drums and I like that.