Ed Friedland’s Building Rock Bass Lines
So, last week I ordered Similac formula from Amazon, as I do every few weeks, to keep Ella growing. While I did this, I also grabbed a book that I saw mentioned on Talkbass – Ed Friedland‘s Building Rock Bass Lines. According to the Amazon reviewers, its a fairly basic and straightforward book, but its well-received by beginning bassists for the way that Ed explains the concepts of what he’s doing.
I went through the beginning of the book, and skimmed a little through some later parts of it, and I can already see that his approach is different. Its more scale-based than what I’ve seen elsewhere, but this is done in a very illuminating way. Ed shows musical notation for the exercises, and then underneath, instead of tablature, shows the scale degree for each note, to really cement in the learner’s head what note from the scale is being played. By doing this, we’re not necessarily focusing on the note names, but on the note’s place in the scale, which to me makes a lot of sense. I think that this might also help build interval knowledge because it very clearly calls out the note’s place in the scale, and thus its relationship to the root. Ingenious!
Been a long time since I rock and rolled (again)
Wow. Its approaching 7 months since I wrote my last blog post. For a lot of that time, I’ve also not been practicing. The baby and work have completely dominated my time. She turned 9 months old today though (5/28) and I actually did a few small music-related things in the past month, so I’m trying to find more time to squeeze in bass practice and blogging about it again. She really likes my basses, BTW. She always leans in to play with the strings up by the headstock. She’s also trying to explore alternate tunings whenever she can get her hands around the tuning pegs.
So, in reverse-chronological order:
Jamplay
I just discovered Jamplay – a subscription-based website that has hundreds (if not thousands) of structured video tutorials for learning how to play guitar from dozens (if not hundreds) of guitar instructors. I came across them from a post on Talkbass last week. The important thing here is that they’ve recently added bass lessons and as of this writing have about a dozen instructors, some of which have more than 20 video lessons ranging from complete novice to intermediate to advanced concepts.
Ugly Bass Face 