Bass Lessons Hollywood

I provide upright and electric bass lessons,  harmony, theory, sight-reading, and song analysis privately from my home near Hollywood. 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.

Keywords: bass lessons  hollywood, upright bass lessons hollywood