Effective Bass Practice

[bass_dude]

I recently got The Evolving Bassist and Ray Brown's Bass Method after being recommended them by some fellow basschat members.

The Evolving Bassist and Ray Brown's Bass Method both seem to be very good. For anyone who has these books, I'd be interested in hearing how you structure your practice sessions with them? Both concentrate heavily on scales and arpegios in every key. Getting through even a page of them can be quite time consuming. Is it best to work through them page by page or dip in to various exercises throughout the books?

Do you mix exercises from these books with playing some songs on bass to keep things interesting?

I'm interested to hear how people make most effective use of their bass practice time.

Richard

[ZMech]

Firstly, get yourself a teacher. I use mine more as an accompaniment to my teacher, where we occasionally discuss how best to use the exercises. Firstly tone is everything, so I went back yesterday and repeated the open string exercises w/ a slow (50bpm) metronome, just to try and put into practise the right hand technique discussion I'd had with my teacher.

Secondly, with scales, get yourself some nice drones to play over. There's a thread somewhere in here with all 12 notes as 3min organ drones. They're extremely helpful when practising scales, as otherwise it's extremely hard to keep the reference note in your head, so having a drone in the backround will improve your intonation, and your interval knowledge.

So each day I'll do something technique based like this until I get bored, or for 10 minutes, whichever comes first. Then comes the more fun part of learning some songs, I was given the exercise last lesson to take a standard I know (went with blue monk), and try and walk it over a super slow (about 30bpm) tempo, putting each note dead in time with the metronome. Turned out to be extremely hard, was quite an eye opener since I considered myself to have pretty good rhythm.

[bass_dude]

Yeah - I've got a teacher and I have got some exercises to practice from the Rufus Reid book but as my lessons have been a few weeks apart so far, I thought I might assign myself some new exercises to do in the mean time.

Thanks for the tip about the organ drones - haven't tried that yet and could do with a reference point when practising scales.

Richard

[ZMech]

Hope you've got on well will the drones, decided I'm gonna be spending a lot of my weekend with my Rufus Reid book. [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/158437-how-to-practise-timing-and-rhythm/"]Thought that this thread I started on how to practise timing[/url] might interest you.

I always find it funny how topics about pickups get lots more attention than those about practising.