Bass Guitar Lessons

The bass guitar is one of the most dominant instruments used in any band. Bass guitar lessons were the first beginner course that I had taken as I started out as a musician. The reason I started out playing the bass was that it seemed like it would be easier to learn, so that is why I chose this instrument first.

No band is complete without the sound of a bass guitar. Sure the guitarist gets a lot of glory with their outstanding solos and riffs, but the bass guitarist can also play those fancy riffs and scales as well. I am going to teach you in this lesson how to:

Read bass tablature

How to make bass chords

How to perform riffs

You may or may not be familiar with the guitar, but to break it down for you to understand, the notes on the bass guitar fret board are the same notes that are on the 6th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd string of the fret board on the guitar. You could actually take a guitar and use only these four strings and play the same notes as you would on a bass guitar.

Take a look at the guitar fret board diagram below and just take away the high E and the B string section of this board and you have the same notes as you would on the bass guitar. Now of course you do have the 5 string electric bass guitar, all you would do then is add the B string of the fret board.

Granite, the bass strings are thicker than the guitar but when both instruments are tuned the same (usually standard tuning) they have the same notes on the fret board. You could take the guitar fret board layout and leave off the high E string and the B string as stated before, and have the same notes. This is useful information for beginner bass guitar lessons as a new player.

One question that comes up often is; do you have to know how to play bass chords to play the bass guitar? The answer is no. You can play the bass effectively by learning the notes on the fret board. Mainly the root notes of any song that you play because every song has a root note or a starting note. Chords are good to learn and it adds that much more to your playing, but it isn’t a must to know to be a great bass player.

Knowing a few scales is very important to learn and should be learned because this is where you are going to learn those riffs and make those great bass runs. The minor melodic pentatonic scale is the most common to learn, and most of the time you will only use a section of that scale to make great bass runs. This is a great starting point for our bass guitar lessons.

This lesson will teach you this scale and a few chords, and I will explain them and give you a list of the most common chords that are used together for any song, which will be the major chords. We won’t study minor chords in this basic lesson, but we will explore those later in our other bass guitar lessons.

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