For a little over a year now I have been fooling around with various musical instruments: bass guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, ukulele, bass ukulele, and piano. It's been quite a journey of learning and experimentation. To some degree, I have wasted a lot of time by not focusing in on one instrument and trying to get as good at it as possible as efficiently as possible. As a middle-aged adult learner I don't have my entire life ahead of me to develop skills with a musical instrument.
I've settled in right now on though on learning the bass guitar. Although I love to play around with the other instruments that I've tried, the bass seems to keep my attention the most. I love the low register of it and how it is a "background" instrument - the stable anchor that holds the music together. It's actually kind of like my entire life / persona: I like to be the person in the background making sure that things hang together. I don't really like being out in the limelight (at least not all of the time).
There are several different bass learning techniques that I have tried over the past eighteen months. Most of them have been online but I also tried face-to-face lessons with a teacher. What I have found is the following:
- I prefer to learn online. This works best for my learning style and is more adaptable to my work schedule.
- It is good to try out a few different ways of learning and a few different teachers. You really don't know what will "click" with you until you give some different teachers / platforms a try.
- If you are going to use a face-to-face teacher, find one that is a bass player and not a guitar player that dabbles in bass. They are related but different instruments. I have found though that someone who is a bass specialist is just simply much better.
- BassBuzz
- TalkingBass
- Scott's Bass Lessons
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