Efficient Practicing

Most beginners intermediate and professionals all have a hard time practicing efficiently. When i say efficiently i dont mean jaming or just doodling around on the bass I mean sitting down and trying to truly get better at bass. There should be 3 states of mind when playing bass. The first is practice.  Practicing should involve lost of repitition, learning new rhythms and forcing your self to learn things you cant play. You need to be distraction free and only focused on bass . The second is jaming around where theres room for errors  and experimentation which could turn into songs and new ideas. And last is playing songs where you need to be in the pocket and theres no room for errors. 

Part of practing is learning to seperate these states of mind. The best way to grow musically and technically on bass is to set yourself a scheduled practice time that you will do everyday no matter what for at least 1 hour. First warm up then for a solid 30 minutes play scales, difficult patterns or find a weakness that you have and isolate it. For example i noticed in my own playing that some bass lines I played were a little bit sloppy when i used my pinky. From then on for about 2 weeks i would sit down and focus on playing with my pinky more to build up dexterity and before i knew it my pinking was stronger and i could play a bit cleaner. And for the last 30 min play to some music or jam over a track. 

By the way you will mess up a lot at first but you have to keep playing to find your groove.

There are a few things I like to do during my focused practice. Ill take a scale and I will play it up and down in in multiple positions across the neck with a metronome. Then I will do the same but with 8th notes then 16th notes, triplets, and 16th note triplets. The point of this is to force you to learn the scale and tighten up your playing. But the key to this is slowing it down so you can play it. Find a comfy tempo and play and when you can nail it at that tempo then you can speed it up. And remember even billy sheehan, geddy lee, and dave ellefson slow down things to learn new stuff so you should too.

And lastly it is a fact that you will come across many things you cant play, you will make tons of errors, and also you will get frustrated but remember every great bassist sucked at one point.

for questions you can email me at papabea8211@gmail.com.