Bass Lessons Burbank
I provide upright and electric bass lessons, harmony, theory, sight-reading, and song analysis privately from my home in Burbank. I was educated at California State University, where I studied under the great Gary Pratt, and Oscar Meza, the Assistant Principal Bassist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Equally important was my education in the real world of music, as I have been playing professionally since the age of fifteen. I began playing, conducting, and music directing for musical theater productions, where I learned how to read music, charts, and scores. I was forced to become a fairly competent pianist, as I was often accompanying rehearsals, and I often played guitar, keys, and bass for various performances. Since then I have gone on to play a wide variety of music, from jazz to latin, to pop, rock, and orchestral music.
When I teach bass lessons, my focus is on transmitting real, applicable musical information. I am not overly concerned with chops and technique, although these things are important inasmuch as they serve the music. Personally I feel that the highest priority is understanding the role of your instrument (in my case, the bass) in the music you are playing. In a sense, I feel that it is more important to understand music than it is to understand the bass. If we develop a comprehensive understanding of music, of songs, of composition, we find that the instrument plays itself. Of course, technique is important. You can’t play the dots if you don’t have the chops. But, I generally focus on technique only to the extent that it serves the music.
As a result, when I teach bass lessons, I tend to focus on the following things: Grooves, song analysis, and reading. During each lesson, I try to throw a little bit of each of these at my student. Each week, I will have you dissect and internalize a different groove. One week it may be Latin, one week it may be Motown, and one week it may be swing. I do this because if you understand the basic grooves that make up Western music, you begin to see the patterns that show up again and again in different types of music. If you have a solid understanding of blues, funk, jazz, swing, country, Latin, and rock grooves, and you have studied and learned what the masters have played in order to articulate those grooves, when you encounter a new tune, you can play a bass part that really makes it happen in a confidant and supportive manner. Every song we hear is driven by that bass part, and if the bass player has a strong and clear rhythmic and harmonic concept from which they are fashioning a bass line, everything works. If the bass player doesn’t really get it, then nothing works.
Playing the Bass
How do you become a great bass player? How do you know what notes to play, how to articulate rhythms, how to play in the pocket? How do you make a band sound great, by laying down a fantastic, solid bass line that leaves no holes for anyone to fall though? I had to think about and attempt to articulate some answers to these questions to them when a friend of mine asked me how I knew what to play when I played bass.
It’s a very interesting question, and one that gave me pause. How do I know what to play? I mean, I’ve been doing it for so long that at this point, I “just know.” I don’t have to think about it all that much from an intellectual standpoint anymore. It’s more or less automatic. I hear a groove and a chord, and I think, “Oh, it’s that thing, it’s that thing…”
But when I was asked the question, “How do you know what to play?” I had to stop and think of a way to explain (to a non-musician) how it was that I knew what to play. I thought about it for a few minutes, and then I gave an answer, which developed into a pretty good explanation of how one approaches learning to play bass. At least from my perspective.
It occurred to me that there seem to be four basic elements. Three of these elements are strictly technical: First, you must simply gain the physical dexterity to hold the strings down and pluck them. Second, you must learn the music theory required to know what notes will “work” in a given situation. Lastly, you must learn rhythms, which for the modern bass player centers around learning “grooves.”
The fourth element is decidedly non-technical . When one discusses the subject of learning music, it is easy to boil down everything to it’s technical elements. This is because the artistic components of music are considerably harder to define, quantify, and therefore discuss and teach. So, there is, at least, a fourth component to playing the bass, or, of course, any musical instrument. It’s you. It’s your soul. Or, maybe…it’s not you. Maybe it would be better to say that it’s the absence of you. While it is perhaps more difficult to enumerate the specific steps one might take to develop one’s sense of artistry than it is to explain how chords and scales are built, there are still a great number of specific things that can be said on this topic.
These are the general principles, or guide posts, as I see them. Physical dexterity, intellectual understanding of theory, intellectual understanding of rhythm, and development of the artistic and intuitive components that lead to good performance.
Each of these principles will be covered in loving and exaggerated detail in forthcoming posts. The beauty of real understanding lies in the cracks and corners of a subject. We do not intend to provide a survey or an overview of the aforementioned topics, but rather to explore them completely, turn them over, to hold them up to the light, and to consider them in all of their infinite complexity.
Keywords: bass lessons Burbank, upright bass lessons Burbank