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When learning songs on the bass makes more sense than learning scales...and it's way more fun too!What happens on your first driving lesson? It’s been a while since I last had a driving lesson, but the memory of my first lesson is something like this:
The rest of the
lesson was spent working on driving the car. If I made a mistake (eg
stalling!) the Instructor explained what I had done wrong and how
to correct it.
(i) The student
meets the teacher And the next series
of lessons follows on that theme…more scales, followed by their
partners in crime, arpeggios. Followed by extending scales over two
octaves, and then two octave arpeggios…and on and on and on. Am I the only
one who thinks there’s something wrong with this approach to
learning the bass?Why do we want to play bass in the first place?Most
people who start playing the bass guitar do so for one or both of
the following reasons: (i) To emulate
a famous bass player In my cases it
was to emulate Geddy Lee (from Canadian power trio Rush) and to play
in a band with my friends who were also learning (David Coombs on
guitar and Kenny Brewster on the drums – even though he didn’t
have a drum kit. Go figure that one). So I got a bass
and an amp, got a teacher and started having lessons. And I was away,
right? Learning all the tunes I wanted to play – Rush, Maiden,
the kind of stuff a 16 year old kid listens to? Right? Wrong! What most bass teachers teach
And so did the
second. And the third. And the fourth
– though to his credit he taught me to read music too(this being
back in the day before the widespread availability of Tab). What about learning
some tunes I always asked? His answer: ‘When
you’ve learned some scales and arpeggios.” No explanation
of why this was so important that I had to learn a ton of scales and
arpeggios before I could start playing songs. No explanation of how learning these scales and arpeggios would then facilitate learning the songs I wanted to play.
To cut a long
story short I went through various teachers – all of whom wanted
to teach scales –eventually I went my own merry way and started
learning songs! The Police, Queen, Rush, some Iron Maiden and then
onto soul and motown (you gotta love that James Jamerson). Fast forward
to the early 90s and I’m now in a band, starting to earn some
reasonable cash and I decided that I wanted to really try and improve
my playing so I did some research and I found out who was the most
regarded teacher in the UK, an American guy who’d been to Berklee,
taught some famous players too (Pino Palladino for one). So I phoned him. Arranged some
lessons. And guess what
he taught? Yep, scales. Only this dude
was the Arch Guru of scale teachers – he taught the modes of
the major scale (all over multiple octaves, with extension fingerings
and all of the associated arpeggios both in triad and 4 note form)
but also all the modes of the Melodic Minor and Harmonic Minor scales
too. I persevered as
long as I could, figuring we’d get to some good stuff eventually
but we just never did and I lost enthusiasm and gave up taking lessons
from him and went back to playing songs. But
isn’t learning scales the traditional approach to learning music? Sort of. Go to a music
store and find some books for beginners on other instruments and this
is the kind of structure you find: First, the introduction
of a musical concept (eg a rhythm, a scale, an arpeggio, a chord) The application
of that concept in a song of some sort. Seriously, go
check it out if you don’t believe me. So why isn’t there a bass method with this approach? Why don’t teachers take this approach?
Actually it’s
two. There are a couple
of books out there that sort of take this approach – however
they do it with songs written expressly for the purpose of the book
(ie songs we’ve never heard of), which logically you would assume
would be a copyright thing. However that becomes harder to work out when you realise that one of these methods is published by Hal Leonard who own the publishing rights to soooooo many songs that you and I know and love and would like to learn to play.
And maybe that’s
what they were taught when they were learning, and they just don’t
know any better. Learning songs
sounds cool –much cooler than scales! – but can it make
me any better? It works for piano. It works for saxophone. It works for violin. Why should bass
be any different? The critical element is to make sure that the song sequence that the student learns starts off bassic [sorry, couldn’t resist :) ] and progresses gradually to harder tunes that will stretch their techniques and capabilities.
With the saxophone
you don’t learn Donna Lee (Charlie Parker) in your first week. And the same goes
for bass. I've prepared a list of 50 songs
aimed at taking beginning bass guitarists through to a pretty high
intermediate standard. And it forms the spine of my lessons with face
to face students and also my recently started online
bass lessons. Playing songs
is more enjoyable than playing scales… In fact there’s
a book you should check out – it’s called THIS IS YOUR
BRAIN ON MUSIC by Daniel Levitin, you’ll find it at Amazon –
but scientific research indicates that memory of something we are
practicing on is strengthened if it is something that we care about. Which do you think
you’d find more enjoyable: playing through something by Rush
(or Muse, or The Killers, or My Chemical Romance or your favourite
band) or playing 2 octave melodic minor scales around the cycle of
5ths?Yeah, I thought so. Don’t we need to know about scales and arpeggios though?
But scales and
arpeggios are simply parts of the musical alphabet. If you want to
progress from being an intermediate player to being a high class player
then you’ll definitely have to learn more about them (though
I still think the teaching of playing them rote is just wrong).
After all, isn’t that what we all signed up for in the first place?
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