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Some Thoughts On Practicing The Bass Guitar (Part 1)

First up, Happy Holidays!? I hope you all had a great time with your family and loved ones over the holidays.
2013 is nearing – despite the best efforts of the Mayans! – and the New Year is a time that folks often use to ‘reboot’ what’s going on in their lives.? So this is as good a time as any to share some thoughts on practicing with you!
Some Thoughts On Practicing
If you’re striving to get better at the bass, ultimately whether you succeed or fail will be dictated by how effectively you practice.? I’m going to take some time over the next few columns to talk about practicing and sketch out some thoughts.For today’s thoughts on practicing I want to talk about the importance of setting goals.

So Why Is Goal Setting So Important?
The reason that understanding more about goal setting is so important is that the spine of your practice schedule should be built from your goal setting document.It’s as simple as this: if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you get there??? Setting concrete and measurable goals – and writing them down! – serves as both the focus of your practice efforts, but also the yardstick by which you can measure at periodic intervals how well you are doing.

Your Goals Need To Be Specific And Measurable

Saying you want to become a better bass player isn’t specific enough – just about everyone wants to become a better player.? Instead what you need to do is set specific goals about what you want to achieve.For example those goals might be to have the ability to play through a specific song. Or to master a specific technique – for example slapping – and then be able to use that technique to play through say a Marcus Miller bass line.

Or you might want to work on gaining the ability to create spontaneous bass lines to chord progressions.? Or you might want to work on improving your transcribing skills.

There’s hundreds of different bass playing goals you could have – and they depend on a unique combination of your current ability level, and where you want to actually get to.

(Sidebar – it’s also possible to have multiple goals and be working on several different aspects of bass playing at the same time.? If this is the case, try and work on mutually beneficial areas so that as you make progress in one area, it fuels your progress in other areas.)

What To Do Once You Have? A Goal
Once you’ve decided on a goal that you want to achieve the first thing you need to do is write it down!Then you need to reverse engineer from that goal and work out the steps that you need to take to achieve that goal.? Start with broad strokes so that you get a clear sequence of going from where you are now to where you want to get to.
These ‘broad strokes’ also act as signposts on your journey.?? Once you’ve established these stepping stones, then you need to work out how you can actually achieve each of those stepping stones, and convert that into a disciplined practice routine to achieve the first step.

The Importance Of Writing Everything Down

Get used to recording everything – from your initial goal statements to your breakdowns of each step, to your daily practice.? And get used to having goal statements for every level of what you’re trying to achieve.Not only should you have an over-riding goal that you’re aiming to achieve, but you should also have that over-riding goal split down into several steps – and each of those intermediate steps should be split down so that you can create weekly and daily practice schedules.

Those weekly and daily practice schedules should have goals too by the way.? One of the biggest improvements I ever made to my learning schedule was to buy a cheap digital timer that I could set for specific periods of time.

Then when I was practicing I would do my first exercise for the allotted time.? When the digital timer beeped to tell me I was done I would turn it off, put a tick next to the first exercise on my daily practice sheet, have a drink and noodle for 20 seconds on my bass.

And then I’d turn to exercise number 2, reset the timer, set the timer going and count myself off.

Being this focused allows you to:

1) Ignore anything that doesn’t lead to the achievement of your goal.
2) Maximise the effectiveness of your practice time.
3) Accurately track your practice time.
4) Allows you to audit how much ‘real practice’ you are doing.
5) Allows you to ‘noodle’ on your bass to reset your attention and not noodle for long periods and think you’re practicing.

Setting goals and planning your practice is one of the most effective ways you align your practicing efforts with what you actually want to achieve and ensure that you are constantly making progress.

This Article first appeared in my weekly magazine First Bass And Beyond

Comments

  1. Hello Paul, my biggest problem is I’m not consistent in practicing my bass guitar. I feel lost, and don’t know where to start. I’m pretty decent with playing songs but I need more direction. I usually pick up songs from youtube, here, or guitar pro. I would like to learn more songs from the isley brothers, Gap Band, etc… Do you have any suggestions on any dvd\ books that I can pick up?