Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Bass Guitar’ Category

Buying a bass guitar is an exciting time. The scent of new experiences and realized dreams is in the air, so a little discipline is called for.

So have you set your price range? You might be looking at somewhere between two and five hundred dollars for a decent bass bought new at a guitar shop. The price of a secondhand bass guitar could start at one hundred and shoot up to over a thousand dollars.

Where to look when buying a bass guitar? The local guitar shop is a logical, but not necessarily the best, choice. Pawn shops usually have a bass guitar or two hanging from the rack, anxious to tell its story. And Craigslist, US Free Ads and your local classifieds will have more choices for you.

It is always wise to try out a range of instruments. You may think that you do not know anything about buying a bass guitar but after you have tried a few you will start to get a feeling for what is good and what is not.

If someone is selling their bass through classifieds they will probably have it set up ready for potential buyers, and your local guitar store should be only too willing to let you try out their bass guitars. If you are tempted to buy sight unseen, do so only if you know you can get your money back if it does not work out. If you see a bass advertised on the net, go to a guitar store and ask about the model and try it out if that is possible.

Of course, before you go buying a bass guitar you should be finding someone who plays bass who would be willing to try instruments out for you. An experienced player will be able to warn you about any adjustments that need to be made or about faults like a warped neck.

Squier is one of the big guitar makers that produces basses and guitars for beginners but they have a reputation for being one of the big producers of poor quality instruments so some care needs to be taken if you become interested in this brand. Ibanez and Epiphone are also brands to go for if you are cruising the guitar retailers.

As far as types of bass guitar go there are probably more kinds of bass than there are regular guitars. There are basses with frets, there are bass guitars without frets. There are instruments with four, five or six strings. The common or garden bass guitar has frets and four strings, and that is the one you should look for if you are a beginner buying a bass guitar.

If you are tempted to go for a new bass guitar from one of the supermarket chains, be careful because quality may not be the main consideration where these instruments were made. If you are really tempted by a bargain but do not know about the brand or model bass you are looking at, check out the guitar forums. Sometimes you can find a forum post about a bargain guitar by typing the name into Google.

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Today I want to talk about how to play bass guitar. The bass guitar player and the drummer in a rock band keep the rhythm of the song moving along while the lead guitarist plays the solos. To switch to this job in a band needs some understanding of the differences between a bass guitar and a regular guitar plus a good grasp on bass guitar playing technique.

Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake And Palmer changed between guitar and bass during concerts and, of course, played both on different tracks on records. Not many people have done this, usually a bass guitar player just plays bass.

Let us take a close look at how a bass guitar works. The usual tuning of a four string bass guitar is E A D G. The tunings are the same on a five string bass except there is a low B string. The six string bass is the same but it has a high C string. So on a 6 string bass you have the tuning of B E A D G C. Also there are seven string basses that have a high F string.

There are quite a few ways you can tune a bass guitar but they are much the same as those used to tune a regular guitar, so it is unnecessary to mention them. As with other guitars, you tune your bass guitar by loosening the string and then tuning it UP to the correct note. You should tune each string separately, always being meticulous about matching the sound of the string to your bass guitar tuner. While we are on the matter of tuning, you should remember to do a search for a free online bass guitar tuner.

With your electric bass guitar, the music is achieved by plucking using the index and middle fingers or striking the string with a pick. The early Fender basses used to have a thumb rest attached to the pickguard situated just below the strings. This was meant to give the fingers somewhere to rest while the thumb plucked the strings. Alot of people think that the pick is used by rock bass players but the truth is players of all styles develop their own individual techniques, sometimes using thumb, fingers or pick depending on the sound they want to make. If the bass guitar player uses all upstrokes the guitar sounds different from if he uses all downstrokes or alternates his strokes of the pick.

Some bass guitar players, Les Claypool and John Entwistle are two examples played using their fingernails just like a classical acoustic guitar player.

The accomplished bass guitar player must be on top of his technique. Nimble fingers and a certain amount of fast playing are often needed. Also, bass guitar music will demand that you develop your own individual style. To get some ideas, listen to and copy the work of the most popular and innovative bass guitar players of recent decades, like Paul McCartney, Pino Palladino – the guy who took over from John Entwistle in The Who, Flea the bass player in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jaco Pastorius – an original bass player universally looked up to by bassists of all styles – Mark King, an extremely fast English bass guitarist, and not forgetting John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.

By Ricky Sharples
This article is aimed at helping the beginner bass guitar player to learn the notes of the bass guitar. If you want to play bass guitar you will need to know the names of seven notes and their places on the bass guitar fretboard. Once you know where the notes are you will automatically know where the sharps and flats are located. Playing bass is an easy to learn skill from a technical point of view. After all, for the bass guitar you do not need to learn chords. At least not at the start. While you are learning the notes on the fretboard you could start right away on learning the bass parts to some of your favorite songs from tabs. The big task ahead of you is getting the ability to take your place as a part of the group you are in. Learning the notes is a start, learning them so that you so not have to think about them takes time and practice.

Here are the notes as they appear on the bass guitar fretboard:

G|—G#—|—A—|—A#—|—B—|—C—|—C#—|—D—|—D#—|—E—|—F—|

D|—D#—|—E—|—F—|—F#–|—G—|—G#—|—A—|—A#—|—B—-|—C—|

A|—A#—|—B—|—C—|—C#–|—D—|—D#—|—E—|—F—-|—F#—|—G—|

E|—F—-|—F#–|—G—|—G#–|—A—|—A#—|—B—|—C—-|—C#—|—D—|

You will notice that I have written the sharp symbol (#) on the diagram of the bass fretboard. You probably already know that one man’s sharp is another man’s flat according to which key the song is in. For instance F# could also be called Gb (G flat) because it is both the note above F and the note below G. Easy to understand but complicated to explain.

Usually you begin learning bass guitar by using the E and A strings to play the bass line of some easy songs. You could begin by simply memorizing where the notes are but it will help if you set yourself the task of learning a song or two. Your memory always appreciates some help from your body and your feelings, so trying to learn some songs will help you get the notes under your skin. You will note that I have only given you the first ten frets. You will see that this is one octave on each string. Once you have the notes on those frets off by heart, the remaining notes will be much easier to learn.

If you take a look at the diagram of the fretboard, you will see that the note at the fifth fret of the E string (A) is the note on the next open string, so once you play up to the fifth fret, you can either continue playing up the neck or you can start playing the notes on the next string. If you have already learnt to play the guitar this will not be a surprise to you. Now that I have explained the basics, if your head is spinning a little, just go back to the simplicity of what you are learning: four strings, four octaves made up of seven notes. That is it. Good luck.