By Kelly Stover

Whether you have a musical bone in your body or not, being your own teacher on how to play the bass guitar is not impossible since a lot of musicians are self-trained. It is a challenge that requires patience and determination. To help out, here are the reminders before learning to produce music with this stringed instrument.

In playing the bass guitar, one should always take one lesson at a time. Bass playing requires repetition and there's no sense in hurrying the learning process, one should feel the notes through his soul and through his heart and become one with the bass guitar.

Attacking The Strings: The most important part to remember while starting to take slap bass lessons is the amount of intensity used to attack the strings. Now that you know the proper hand positioning and wrist movement you must know how to attack the strings with your thumb.

Make sure you learn all the most common scales. The scales you should learn are the major scale, minor scale, melodic minor, harmonic minor, pentatonic, blues, and minor blues. These are all really common and should prepare you for just about any situation. I have also a few tips for gigs:

Save the beer for in between setlists. Drink water if you're thirsty. If someone offers you a beer just before a setlist, just set it to the side and save it for the next break. Water drinking musicians onstage just look more professional than beer-drinking ones.

The mathematics of this exercise work out so that you must play the scale through 3 times before the accent will again fall on the beginning note. That is one reason why this exercise is so beneficial. Be patient and practice this exercise until you can play it all the way through the three repetitions without mistakes.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be harder than it looks. Here's why: The muscles that move your hands and fingers across the neck and strings are rarely used for other tasks. The fine motor skills needed to play a stringed instrument require that the small muscles of the hands be strengthened. So when you take up the bass, you're like a baby learning to walk: Not only do you have no idea of what you're doing, you don't even have the muscles to do it.

A tooth-loosening, earth shattering bass sound is attainable at the home studio level through two highly effective recording methods: by micing the bass amp with a quality signal chain, using a direct injection box to go straight to the board/input, or both!

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