ParrotDye

I can't remember exactly which site I saw this on, but one piece of advice was "ask your perspective teacher for referees", so I tried it out on a couple of teachers. One never got back to me and another argued himself out of it. [quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1395084173' post='2398503'] However, it has to be said that nowadays you can glean so much information for free off the internet and from You Tube in particular that a lot of what you used to have to pay to find out is available for nothing if you know what it is you need to look for. A good teacher is invaluable, but by the same token, if you are motivated, there has never been such a good time to teach yourself as much as possible under your own steam. [/quote] [quote name='The Admiral' timestamp='1395159210' post='2399315'] Scott's Bass Lessons [/quote] I'll be checking this guy out. Thanks [quote name='d_g' timestamp='1395154299' post='2399251'] It's worth you knowing that most peripatetic teacher in schools get paid £30+ an hour (at least around here!) On the multiple disciplines, I teach both bass and guitar. All of my playing work these days is on bass but I am a pretty good guitarist (Grade 8 or so) although much more comfortable with bass. There are so many more people looking to learn guitar that nearly 3/4 of my students are guitar. I would say being a good teacher is actually more important that being a good player...to a degree... [/quote] I can see why this is true; when I was studying I met a few maths and physics supervisors without the teaching skills to get their knowledge across easily - why would bass be any different. None of them offered therapy either, mores the pity.

I'm glad things are working out. Keep us updated. [quote name='NancyJohnson' timestamp='1395826322' post='2406675'] If the originals band doesn't work out, there's plenty of online sites that should assist you in finding like-minded musicians locally - search for Join My Band, Partysounds, Bandmix, Forming Bands, Music Radar, Musofinder. There's dozens of them. P [/quote] Thanks to this guy for the info.

Yeah, he's good eh! I think you called it on the pedal.

Added to spotify. This reminds me of in game menu music from Gran Turismo 5.

Welcome to BC

Welcome to BC Dave.

That sounds good, thanks for the advice

Thanks. Is it normal for teachers to offer classes in multiple disciplines?

Hi all, What is the going cost for bass lessons? A short and sweet question huh. ParrotDye

[quote name='subrob' timestamp='1393036400' post='2375586'] In full honesty I know a bit more about the mechanics of drums than I do of bass. But, the bigger reason of that is because I was party to the distribution of drums, for a time, and towards the end of that time I got a little bit into product development ideas, which included gathering knowledge of tonewoods. While I was there, the manufacturer introduced a range of drums which were identical, several kit configurations, several lacquered finishes, but in two tone woods i.e maple and birch. All made in the same factory, all the same lugs, heads, hardware, paint finishes, all turned up in the same shipping container. We got a container load of those kits. I personally assembled (drum sets ship in russian doll format) and tuned up probably 10 to 15 of those, and I recall being surprised at the consistent differences between the quality of the attack and the percieved different EQ of maple vs birch sets. Now I get it that drums are an acoustic instrument, and when you come along with a pick up (i.e. a dynamic mic) the perceived tone changes radically as a result of that pick up and the electronics (especially mic distortion and compression treatments). However, i'm of the opinion there are totally transferable physical mechanisms at work here, in terms of resonance. Maple is a realtively hard wood, as a rule, birch being softer. This has significance in the attack of the note as the speed of energy transfer, the speed of sound, if you like, is faster in a harder, denser hardwood. A stringed instrument is clearly played in a different manner to a percussion instrument, but do they not have some similarity? A great drum sound has an an attack and a consistent musical decay; a complex and dynamic sound, full of harmonics. A bass note, especially a finger pluck and most especially a slap or pop (fire proof overalls are on at this point) is highly percussive. Perhaps variation in the quality of attack is where we ought to be looking if we want to understand the implication of tonewoods in our basses? I for one am pretty convinced, despite some excellent counter arguements, that there is a clear means of mechanical feedback from string to the 'chassis' and back into the strings, through the nodal points at the bridge, fret and nut. One other thing, I thought the 'blind test' experiments described were maybe a little unfair, as saying which is 'A' and which is 'B' is a hard thing for a brain to do, unless you already know what A and B sound like in the context of recording compression and the tonal response of your monitoring device. You could say both sounds are treated equally, but that doesn't mean to say that any given listener can do much more than guesstimate at how a recording might react to his/ her playback set up. Interesting learning with you, gents. That is all. Dont flame me ;P [/quote] That's a fascinating insight. You need controls in place when doing comparisons and having the same man perform the same task to a good sample of identical kits save for the wood is exactly the way to test stuff. Do you recall if there was any variance between individual kits of the same composition? Also, see [url="http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-speed-solids-d_713.html"]this[/url] for some general speed of sound through materials figures. They can be used for rough guides as to how energy is propagated through different materials but without taking account of sample specifics like material composition or impurities. The figures are close enough to see that a hardwood rated at around 4000m/s would resonate quicker than a softwood at around 3500m/s. I thought to check Wikipedia for tonewoods and the site is pretty vague. There are a few things related to materials properties which are worth consideration. Snell's Law governs relative speed and direction of waves between two mediums. There are also several materials properties and many engineering moduli that can be used to model how sound travels through materials. For solids there are two separate speeds of propagation to account for, compression waves and shear waves. Compression waves are proportional to the square root of Bulk + 4/3 Shear moduli over density while Shear waves are proportional to square root of Shear over density. Anyone wishing to melt their brains should check out Wikipedia's Speed of Sound page, and for a bonus tempering of any remaining grey matter check bulk modulus.

These sound good [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Dakota (Stereophonics)[/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Learning to Fly (Foo's)[/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Blitzkreig Bop (only 4 notes in the whole song!)[/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Teenage Kicks (4 notes plus 1 passing note)[/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Any blues standard - just learn the standard A-D-E 12 bar and you've got it, stuff like Johnny B Goode, Route 66 etc you can get away with playing the same bassline for any of them, and stick in variations/passing/walking as you feel more confident playing them. Wow, even an octave up occasionally![/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif] [/font][/color][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif] [/font][/color]

[quote name='BassTractor' timestamp='1394807098' post='2395454'] As to getting lessons, there's several from Swindon on BC already, so they MUST give you a BC buddy discount. I command them! [/quote] Well now that sound like a fantastic idea. Come forward all ye tutors. Thank you all for the welcome. [quote name='BassTractor' timestamp='1394839052' post='2395961'] Just want to add the RS2014 is one Hull of a cabinet, but it's overkill really. Personally, I think TC Electronic should never have built it. [/quote] If you've got a picture of that, I've love to see it

Fixed the public setting now. I take your point that a video was a little extreme. I was a curios how a video would turn out too, both from a sound and video standpoint and how well I come across. So what is a Tascam; the only thing I can find that looks close is a portable 8 track recorder. And are Hal Leonard books just tab with timing? I found these videos, the [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1OedAcm2k"]first[/url] talking about how ledger lines are't used and antiquainted riffs are avoided, then the [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDdUbioVLy4"]second[/url] ironically using both. What am I missing out on? I'm not claiming Rocksmith has taught me anything. It's certainly facilitated some learning. For instance, initially I was struggling with two finger plucking, so I researched it, practiced it and am now a lot better at it. Then later I found I was getting pull-offs wrong so I researched it and found I needed a small flick off to make it sound. I practiced that and am again a lot better at it. More recently, I've started the daunting slap and pop stuff. I found a Flea DVD and a number of other resources on slap and pop before I was getting close to actually making a good sound. So I'm in the cycle of practice and improvement. If I can get to 95% accuracy on Higher Ground at some point then I'm probably going in the right direction. [quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394838163' post='2395953'] You might be a hero in a virtual world but you'd die at a live gig. [/quote] C'mon, there's no need for that! I'm about mid table on some of the score attacks, but in fairness I don't really care about score. I'm more interested in learning to play than perfecting some easy song for a short term high. I wouldn't die at a gig because I wouldn't be stupid enough to assume I could rock up with a band I barely knew, gel instantly, and whip out awesome licks without trying. I'd join a band and rehearse for a while, play songs I could handle, and practice difficult passages until they stuck.

[quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394786352' post='2395158'] There is one huge elephant in the room you don't touch on at all - the tuning. RS1 made you check tuning after every menu/song change which too ages. The "fix" for this was to make the tuner so incredibly sensitive, and to list songs in alternate, slightly off, and drop tuning that you just spend your life tuning the bass instead of playing. It was completely unnecessary for them to do that, at least the slightly off should have been normalised to 440. [/quote] You're right Rich, I'd forgotten to mention tuning. It's true that Rocksmith will ask you to retune for every differently tuned song but it will not between multiple songs with the same tuning. It also has a few songs with slightly sharp or flat tunings which I would have liked to standardise and I do avoid them as a result. Retuning is more of an issue for me on 6 string as it was a floating bridge and the damn thing takes 3 or 4 tries to get right. For my hard tail bass I only have to retune once. Rocksmith also allows you to fine tune your strings in the pause menu within a song; presumably incase you need to tweak it. There is a digital style tuner in the bottom left of the screen which I usually use to tune both guitars before I play a song, and it will adjust for any non-standard pitches depending on song. I believe this was an update. There are occasions when a note is not detected. For me these are usually occur in sub Eb standard setups and seem to be the result of me over depressing the string into the fretboard. One solution for this is to slightly undertune the dropped string so that fast and furious fretting doesn't get in the way of hitting the notes, otherwise you'll need fretless bass levels of precision to keep the string from tensing up too much. I imagine the reason for the sensitivity of the tuner is due to the inclusion of oblique bends on the lead side. It does also become obvious if you are out of tune midway through a track as you suddenly start missing all the notes from one string. [quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394786352' post='2395158'] Your comments about the 2deliberate mistakes" are hugely frustrating when you try to 100% a song, play every note and still get a miss. Now when you go through and listen you can find these, add them in, and get 100%. Mary Janes Last Dance is a fine example of this, two notes are missing from the highway. [/quote] [quote name='Kempy535' timestamp='1394827378' post='2395771'] The note to fret placement has you running all over the fret board. [/quote] I was referring to the running all over the place as the intentional errors. I think they are deliberate simply because there is usually a perfectly good place to play the same note that doesn't involve a dive up to the 15th fret from the neck when an open G would be just as good. A good example of this would be Police - Every Breath You Take as much of the track is palm muting around the 5th fret. Gamification maybe? Is that track boring on bass otherwise. The point is RS will take the right note from a different position on the fretboard if you think it's better, and sometimes it appears to throw down the challenge of asking the near impossible for which there is a much simpler alternative. I looked at Mary Jane's Last Dance again and I can't find any missing notes so I feel you're mistaken there Rich. I took some video of me working through each phrase in turn; [url="http://youtu.be/KlkjI-1paK8"]here[/url]. Skip to 10:30 for the summary screen [quote name='Kempy535' timestamp='1394827378' post='2395771'] I also found the volume level to change mid song and the tones to be a little off. [/quote] I had the same thing Kempy, but after digging around in menus, I found the gain setting got the cable and turning it up seems to level the volume changes between tracks. Rocksmith is not really a learning tool, its a sandbox. The things I've learnt have been through my effort, not some Matrix style download with a price tag. I can't afford tuition, so I've used videos on youtube, chats with musicians, trial and error, theory content, etc. Rocksmith just fits neatly into that landscape as a practice space. [quote name='ScreencastTutor' timestamp='1394811286' post='2395522'] The best thing about Rocksmith is CDLC. I've made a fair few myself, easy to do. Check customsforge.com for them. [/quote] I wish I could access custom tracks. That would solve a bunch of cash flow problems and allow for reworking tracks and tones to taste. If you're using a PC, have at it. As it stands, I have paid for the import of RS1 tracks to RS2014, and have added about 60 DLC tracks to my library so I figure that must have cost £160 which would get me the decent second hand amp and compressor I need to actually start playing for real, however, I've had a blast in the process and have only recently started yearning for the gear. Back at day 1, I had no more skill at playing than I possessed from my teenage forays; that's got to count for something.

Hi all, I'm new here and pretty inexperienced when it comes to bass, however, games I do know inside out, so I offer you my experiences with Rocksmith 2014 and the improvements over the previous Rocksmith title. [b]ROCKS[/b] For anyone who doesn't know, Rocksmith was a videogame designed to use a guitar as an input device. About Nov last year RS2014 came out, now rebranded as learning software. The difference is moot as it does roughly the same thing, only now with a few additions and a much better menu system. The premise is that strings are colour coded, and coloured notes travel down columns representing a frets and hit the string at the point when the note is played. Some notes incorporate symbols to indicate slides, bends, hammer-ons or pull-offs, palm or fret-hand mutes, natural or pinch harmonics, tapping, accents, slaps, pops, sustains, tremolos and vibratos. Meanwhile, the columns the notes appear on represent the places where your fingers should go and contain information on note duration and finger placement. Songs are split up into phrases and as you perfect each phrase, it adds more notes or techniques into the phrase until you max out the songs' score. [b]TIME[/b] One improvement over the first title is the ability to set a songs' mastery phrase by phrase without the need to 'level up'. In addition, the game sets up your initial mastery based on your overall performance in the game so far; for instance when I load up Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark, my initial mastery is roughly 88% but varies depending on individual phrase difficulty (the intro is easy and therefore 100%, the bridge slightly harder and starts at 75%). On the other hand, Incubus's I Miss You starts fully maxed out because it's easy throughout. If I switch over to 6-string, these drop down to my level there. While this system is flattering, I still need to reduce a new song to a simpler setting to start with, just to learn what I'm supposed to be playing, and often I will set it up to increase phrase difficulty regardless of how I perform just to see where I'm ultimately heading. [b]EFFORT[/b] This system of progression through dynamic difficulty is analogous to increasing precision at constant tempo, rather than constant precision at increasing tempo, as would be the case of a sight reader or tabman. It's worth mentioning that I still have to learn the songs. There is far too much information for the brain to process when running at full speed, so knowing that X follows Y is necessary and the only way to see what's going on is to slow the track down to a crawl, pause and practice a bit, then have another go. Once a song or phrase is mastered, it becomes fairly easy to find what to play through muscle memory and onscreen cues. [b]FAQts[/b] As a nod to previous posters on this subject, I want to address a couple of complaints. Firstly, the game is fairly forgiving in terms of timing and I think it does so because learning an instrument is hard enough without being denied a successful hit for being slightly ahead or behind the beat. I have experienced this first hand and know how patronising it feels to play poorly and be given a jovial "You're gonna be a superstar" and an accuracy of 95%. I've since turned off the subtitles and voiceover to avoid this and spend most of my time replaying songs to hone my timing and execution. I know when I've played a hammer-on or missed a note it credited me for and so practice, practice, practice. Secondly, complaints of lag are greatly exaggerated. HD TVs and monitors waste time doing something called handshaking and both Rocksmith and RS2014 compensate by pushing the video out early rather than the audio out late. For console editions you use an old RGB or composite scary lead to jack into your hi-fi and set up an multi-channel output so that the display and the associated lag do not impact the delivery of audio, and then you're golden. As an aside, you can check the lag out for yourselves by turning on the hi-fi and TV sound simultaneously, where the lag is obvious even on the XMB or Dashboard. In order to calibrate lag more accurately, I pick a song and slow it down to make sure the onscreen notes are in time with the drums on the backing tracks. The only aspect of RS2014 that suffers from lag is the technique games which rely on on-screen prompts rather than a drum beat and memory. Lastly, the lessons have been given a good shoeing, and rightly so. While they do cover the basics, they function as little more than practice arenas for that particular skill. I've found that if you get stuck on one lesson, the game cannot guide you though in smaller steps, nor can it increase the challenge over and above giving you a separate, harder lesson on the same topic. [b]FIGURES[/b] As for my own complaints, I do not like the colours they picked for the strings as they are too similar and I'm colourblind (deuteranomoly). This isn't too bad on bass as there is only Red and Orange to screw up, and RS2014 has got a colourblind mode which Daltonizes the palette yet only succeeds in shifting the problems to note recognition against the background which is just as bad. Again, this is practice, practice, practice, as, if I know the note is there and which one it is, I will remember. The other major complaint I have regards note duration. While some chords or sustains are clearly shown as cut off, most of the 8ths and 16ths are simply displayed as notes in amongst others, so for those who share my love of OCD, this will annoy and send you reeling off to the CD rack to get the right timing down. [b]MONEY[/b] The track list is worth noting; it's a bit iffy and it's expensive to buy extra tracks. The game and cable costs £50 (I think) but additional tracks are typically £2.40 a pop or sometimes £9.70 for a pack of five. There is a good range of titles on-disc but I was left feeling that lesser songs were pushed out while preferential ones were held back for DLC. For instance Wheezer - Say It Ain't So is on disc while Hash Pipe is DLC, Rush - The Spirit of Radio is on disc while YYZ is DLC, B'z - Ultra Soul is on disc while Hotei - Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Kill Bill Vol. 1 soundtrack) is DLC. There are some high points like White Zombie - ThunderKiss '65, Radiohead - Paranoid Android, Muse - Knights of Cydonia, and Monster Truck - Sweet Mountain River; that last I'd never heard before but wow is it good to play on bass. [b]GEAR[/b] The other features which I haven't touched on, but are no doubt a huge draw to some are the tone designer and session mode. Tone Designer allows for a bunch of licensed amps, cabs and effects pedals to be stacked, tweaked and used in the game. I'm no expert on Marshall vs Orange gear so I can't tell how good the analogue is to the real deal but as someone of modest means, I welcome the ability to try out something I can't afford. Session Mode is an AI band that you can jam with. There are loads of instruments with which to form a band (although too many synths for my liking) and you modify the behaviour of the band to introduce challenges like direction change or tempo slew, then pick a scale and get to work. It's apparently pretty good and I did have to prise my bass from my brother after an hour of him jamming in Mixolydian with a Banjo player and a Steel Drummer. The games are pretty funny for the most part, but as mentioned above, fundamentally broken by TVs inherent delay. [b]SUM[/b] Overall, I consider Rocksmith 2014 as a sandbox for learning. It has the obvious attraction of playing recognisable songs with decent guitar and bass effects, and the method of learning is way more accessible than tablature or score. There are also seemingly intentional mistakes built into the tracks as challenges similar to vintage Mechano kits, perhaps to encourage independence from the player. RS2014 eschews the forced progression and gating of the previous Rocksmith in favour of open content, and is best enjoyed by setting your own standards as goals. While it does lack the deep learning content that the Ubisoft's PR would like to think is there, it does put and keep a guitar in your hands; as testament to this I have used by 6 string more in the last year and a half than in the preceding 22 years, and bought a bass 9 months ago after trying out the bass emulation within the game. It does not stand on it's own as the only way to learn (I don't think any piece of software ever could) but together with the plethora of other resources available such as tuition and video guides, Rocksmith gets the job done. For the price of a years worth of strings, there is every reason to recommend Rocksmith.