Before going further, there won't be anything really of interest to anyone but me. It is an entertaining indulgence to recollect this, and writing it down helps organize my memories. What follows is the story of how I ended up playing bass, followed by some recommendations for anyone else who might be starting out on the instrument.

The Bass, Act 1: 1973 - 1979

One day during the 4th grade, instead of having gym class, all the kids were assembled and the orchestra teacher gave a talk. He demonstrated the instruments being taught: violin, viola, and cello. Sign up forms were handed out for mom or dad to sign. Certainly he must have said signing up was optional, I don't recall it. Of the three, the cello seemed most interesting; mom signed the form, and my fate was set.

About two weeks later gym class was again canceled, and this time the band teacher gave a presentation on all the instruments: drums, trumpets, trombones, clarinets, flutes, and probably other things. Had this presentation been given first, I might have ended up playing some other instrument.

I played cello from 4th grade through freshman year of high school. Although I did OK in the pecking order during grade school, my heart really wasn't in it, and practiced reluctantly. In high school, only the kids who really wanted to be there were left, and my lack of interested really showed. I was the last chair of 8 cellos, and the days where every person had to play solo in front of everyone else were hugely embarrassing to me. Momentum had brought me that far but was no longer enough, so I quit after freshman year.

The memory of playing the last note of the last song of the last concert that year is still vivid, as at the time I made a point of remembering it. I was glad it was done, but sad about the wasted six year investment, sad that my mother was disappointed. At 15, my musical career was seemingly over. Even now, 40 years later, two or three times a year there is a dream where I am handed a cello and need to play on stage immediately. Half the time it is a tension-filled disaster, and half the time I play really well and it is thrilling.

The Bass, Act 2: 1983 - 1987, whimpering to 2008-ish

High school is when I had a few dollars and started collecting records and finding my own musical interests, instead of just listening to the records my older siblings had on hand. Perhaps it was my natural inclination, or maybe due to my time playing cello, I found I was mostly listening to the bass part of songs. Chris Squire of Yes was a favorite, as was Bruce Thomas of Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

Over 1983 Thanksgiving weekend from junior year of college, the family went out to a restaurant for dinner. While waiting for food, my father posed the the question: if you didn't need to consider money, what do you think you'd like to try and do? Although I was pretty excited to be a programmer or electrical engineer (my degree), in fairness to the hypothetical I had to come up with something, so I said: I dunno -- maybe play bass. A month later, at Christmas, there was the usual assortment of new socks, shirts, underwear, a couple books. After all the wrapping was off, my father said: tomorrow the music store is open; let's go buy a bass. That was highly unusual, to say the least.

That first bass was a $200 Fender Squire, and a $50 15W crate amp. I have no complaints about that bass, and I played it until about 1991. Being an electrical engineering student, I quickly built a little circuit which took input from my bass and from the record player and (after the appropriate compensation filter) mixed them together. This was just before CDs appeared on the scene, so learning a song meant picking up the needle, placing it at just the right place to get the phrase I was trying to learn, playing along, and repeated it dozens of times until the whole thing was memorized.

The first song I learned was Keep On Working from Pete Townsend's solo album of the time, Empty Glass.

I found that songs by The Police were great to learn, for a couple of reasons:

• They were quite popular, so I already had the albums and could hear all the songs in my head
• Most songs had really catchy hooks that were repeated over and over. This meant that I didn't need to pick up the needle repeatedly, as the hook would be repeated shortly, and once the hook was learned, that was half of the song right there.

Although cello and bass are both written in bass clef, and although I had been a pretty decent sight reader when I played cello, I strictly played by ear on bass. One reason is I didn't have much sheet music to work from, but even more importantly, cello strings are tuned a fifth apart, while bass is tuned a fourth apart. Even though it had been at least five years, when looking at sheet music, my reflects still wanted to play "G", "D", and "A" as the top three open strings, while on bass the top three are "A", "D", and "G".

I never played with other people, just records, and then later CDs. I learned many songs by Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, The Police, Robert Cray, and even some challenging Yes songs. But I fell into a trap of just playing the same songs I knew over and over, instead of doing the hard work of learning more songs. Then I was in a relationship, and bass collected dust. Then another, and another leading to marriage, and kids. Eventually, with some reluctance, I sold it all for peanuts.

The Bass, Act 3: 2016 - now

As my daughter was finishing high school, she obtained her driving license, and I was spending much less time carting her around. What was I going to do with this free time? And the meager social life I had was mostly in activities related to the school, which would soon disappear. That is when the itch to play returned. I asked my wife for permission, and she (of course) granted it: for my 52nd birthday I bought a bass and an amp, both off craigslist.

Rather than repeating the mistakes of Act 2, this time I'm determined to do better. This time I'm (re)learning to sight read, learning some music theory, practicing with intent, and playing with human beings. Being in a gigging group is an anti-goal; I just want to make some music with other people of similar low ambition, and to get better.

After playing along to records and learning from some youtube channels and getting some facility back, I first checked the musicians category on craigslist. Perhaps it is just Austin, but it was very very hard to find someone who was looking for what I was looking for: playing just for fun with no desire to escalate into a performing band. Instead I found what I was looking for in the fall of 2018 on meetup.com, specifically Let's Start a Beginners Band. This infrequently meeting group gets anywhere from 10 to 25 people together; each person says their name, their instrument, and what their interests are. That is followed by a mingle where like-minded people exchange contact information. And that is how I found myself in my first band.

But it wasn't smooth sailing. Everyone was absolutely nice and I had no problems with anyone personally. The problem was that we had agreed to meet every two weeks, but it ended up being every four, five, or six weeks. At first I learned a lot about playing with real people instead of CDs, but that plateaued quickly, and playing so infrequently meant no progress. After about 9 months of that, the group dissolved.

About that time I started taking a weekly hour-long private lesson. At my request, the lessons aren't very structured. Every week is an ad-hoc discussion of some questions I have, or requests for tips on dealing with specific problems. He goes along with this gamely, though I imagine it is frustrating for him. The one constant is that every week he or I picks a new song to learn, and the next week we play it together (him on guitar, me on bass), usually to a backing track. That progress can be followed here. The songs aren't polished to perfection. The recordings are almost always the first/only take, and I botch some of it. But the point isn't to have a radio-ready song; it is the practice that was motivated by learning a new song.

The guitar player from that ill-fated meetup.com band and I kept in touch and started playing 1:1 at my house every couple of weeks. Then we connected with a keyboard player. A few weeks later we found a drummer on craigslist, and a few weeks later he found a singer. This group meets much more regularly and there is more focus and expectation to come prepared to rehearsal, and the results are dramatically better. Another factor is that the drummer is an old hand who is better than the rest of us beginners, and his solid drumming helps hold everything together. As of January, 2020, when I'm writing this, I'm learning a lot again.

Notice that date in the previous paragraph: January, 2020. A couple months later covid brought an end to that group.

In the spring of 2023 I answered a craigslist ad looking to put together a band to play cover songs. The thing that appealed to me was it said something like: this is for fun, work and family come first, maybe play once a week. I auditioned and got in. There was a period of lineup instability and playing a number of short sets at open mic nights, we finally have a regular lineup and in the fall of 2024 played our first full set. The band is called Noise On The Rocks. We play songs from the 60s through modern times, but mostly centering on the 90s.

Learning Resources

General Advice

• Learning music is a long haul. There is so much to possibly learn, and there are so many fantastic musicians out there, sometimes it can be dispiriting. This is normal but it must be rejected. The goal should be to get better, and that is absolutely possible for anybody. If your goal is to be the best ever, there is a 99.9999% chance of failing; most of us will never be Victor Wooten.
• Like any skill, the fastest way to progress is to practice with intent. This means paying attention; it means doing real work, not just noodling around or playing the same things over and over.
• Practice regularly, ideally at the same time every day, since habits are easier to maintain than playing at ad-hoc times. If you are too busy, it is still better to play for only five minutes than to skip a day. Once you start, often you'll find that that five minutes will turn into fifteen minutes or half an hour.
• Progress happens via an accumulation of small improvements; rarely is does it come in leaps. (To be fair, progress can be pretty rapid at first since you are starting from zero.) Keep this in mind and it will help prevent disappointment from unrealistic expectations.
• You can play along to a record and it sounds good, but don't think you are done. Put the original song in the left track of a recording, and record yourself playing in the right track. On playback, boost up the right channel or even mute the left channel and listen to yourself with a critical ear.
• Playing music with real people is its own skill. You will find that you can play along seemingly flawlessly to a song on a CD, but when you try to play that song with live musicians, your confidence may disappear and your playing will suck to the point of collapse. Just keep playing with real people and you'll learn how to prevent that.
• Playing music with people is a social activity. People who are reliable and fun to be around get more opportunities to play than people who are technically better but are miserable to be around.

Notation vs Tablature

There is a long-standing debate on whether learning standard musical notation or tab(lature) is better. Certainly I'm not the final word on the subject, but I have thoughts on the matter.

The top line is standard notation, where each symbol indicates a note value and a note duration, and often other information. The bottom line is the corresponding tablature representation. The four lines represent the four strings of a bass, and the number indicates which fret to press on that string and in what order.

It is absolutely possible to learn to play and even be in a band without learning standard notation, without learning tab for that matter. Learning tab is appealing to the beginning bassist, but eventually it can be limiting.

Pro's of tablature:

• It is easier to learn
• Most free resources you find online use tab
• It conveys fingering information

Con's of tablature:

• It conveys fingering information; a strength is also a weakness. A given note usually appears in more than one place on the neck (up to four times in fact). Standard notation doesn't dictate which version to use, while tab does. Experienced musicians often prefer to figure out their own fingering.
• Tab tends to convey less information; it is simply a sequence of string & fret locations; it presumes you will know how long to play each note and where to put the rests. Yes, there are many attempts to add rhythm and dynamics, but they are not standardized, and as more information is conveyed, tab's primary benefit, simplicity, is lost. One might as well switch to standard notation at that point.
• The tabs you find online tend to be notably worse quality than stuff written in standard notation. I think that is because people who read/write standard notation tend to be more into it, are better musically educated, and are more meticulous about it.
• I find it easier to connect standard notation to music theory. This is of little importance when playing, but is useful when analyzing how a song is constructed. For example, tab is a sequence of essentially geometric positions on a fingerboard, whereas in standard notation, when I see a sharp or flat, I know something interesting is going on because that note falls outside the seven diatonic notes of the current key.
• People who mostly read standard notation find it easy to read tab; people who mostly read tab find reading standard notation difficult. As a result, standard notation readers have a wider pool of resources to use.
• Tablature is specific to an instrument. If you show bass tab to a piano player, they won't be able to make sense of it.

Favorites

Favorite Books

I've read less than 1% of the available bass books, and no doubt there are great books that I'm unaware of. All the same, here are a couple books that I have used and highly recommend (and others are equally enthusiastic about them too).

• Hal Leonard Bass Method Complete Edition, by Ed Friedland, is absolutely fantastic and is a great first book. It is about $16. Be careful: there are older Hal Leonard books by the same title, so make sure you have the Ed Friedland version. It starts from the absolute basics and teaches you to sight read using exercises that are approachable and appealing and musical. No boring exercises of playing the major scale in 12 keys, just a series of songs, each of which uses only the ideas that have appeared previously in the book. You play along to backing tracks, and you can hear or suppress the reference bass part as well. My advice is not to rush it; if you get stuck mastering a particular exercise, be patient and keep at it before moving on. Starting from zero, in a few months of diligent practice you will be able to read and play the final song of the book.
• Building Walking Bass Lines, by Ed Friedland, is another great book, but is not suitable as first book. It too is under $16. Even if you never want to play jazz, learning to create a walking bass line from nothing but chord changes is a great skill to have, and it teaches you a lot about what notes make sense to play to chords in non-jazz contexts. The book starts with the simplest bass line (four quarter notes per bar, playing only the root note) and builds up sophistication in bite-sized steps from there. Although the resulting bass lines can be somewhat formulaic, they are passable. It is a great jump start and you can always add nuance and variety as your own skill grows.

Favorite Youtubers

There are tremendous resources available on youtube. It is all too easy to watch hour after hour of instructional videos and think you are learning, but in fact are just killing time. The most important thing is to pick up you instrument and play. So be wise in watching only things where you actually learn something and aren't just killing time with edutainment.

• Dan Hawkins Bass Lessons is full of practical bass instruction. Dan has a calm personality and really communicates that playing bass well is within reach. It doesn't require innate genius to play; anybody can do it if they spend a bit of time on it. Each of Dan's lessons has some pattern or tip to incorporate to make even better lines.

• Luke from Become A Bassist is another good resource for practical advice for beginner to intermediate players.

• Bass Buzz has a lot of great content aimed at the beginning bassist.

• Tom Bornemann does great transcriptions and posts content frequently. One of the great things about his transcriptions are they also contain the chord changes.

• Andy Usher makes jam tracks. These are typically 10 minute long videos where a sequence of chords is shown, and guitar/keys/bass are playing something Andy made up to fit those chords. The idea is to pick up your instrument and play along, or to listen and get ideas about how he transitions between chords. There are a lot of jam tracks videos on youtube, but what I like about his channel is the active phrases are highlighted as the song progresses, making it easier to follow along. Many other channels show the all the chord changes with no indication of phrase boundaries or how often sections are repeated.

• Signals Music Studio is my absolute favorite channel for music theory, but it will be too confusing for beginners. Although he is a guitarist, the information is usable by players of any instrument. Jake is knowledgeable, pleasant to listen to, and presents music theory in a direct, understandable way that is immediately applicable.

• Philip Conrad is a working musician who produces interesting content. He is another tranquil personality, not a hype-monster like many people on youtube use to build a following. He has a mix of practical advice, philosophy, and shootouts comparing gear (eg, various DI boxes, the effects of different size cabs).

• Adam Neely is a bassist, and his channel is a grab bag of things that I find very interesting and motivating. Make no mistake: he isn't a how-to channel. Many of his videos are philosophical in nature; some are about what life is really like for a NYC musician. They are well shot, edited, and are always thought provoking.

• Scott's Bass Lessons is perhaps the premiere bass instruction channel. Scott has a very successful subscription site offering in depth learning resources. The stuff he posts on youtube is a mix of useful content and not-so-useful promotional content. You can try the paid site for two weeks for free, and after that it is something like $100 a year. I did sign up for a year and the courses are quite good, and new material is added faster than one can keep up with it.

  The previous paragraph was written in early 2020. Since then I have to say Scott's Bass Lessons youtube channel has declined in quality. There is a lot of click-bait videos, interviews, listicles, and much less pure instructional content. Maybe his for-pay SBL instruction is still good, but his youtube videos are mostly not.

Favorite Software

• Moises
• Ultimate Guitar
• Reaper
• Audacity
• Musescore
• AudioStretch (osx, ios, android)
• Drum Genius 2.0
• A-Tuner Lite (android app)
• Metronomerous (android app)

Moises is the single best tool that I use for learning new songs and practicing those that I already know. You can try it for free, but it is well worth the $40/year to get other features and to have unlimited use. You give it an mp3 file and it uses AI to split it into tracks. There are various options but I have it set to split it into five tracks: vocals, guitar, drums, bass, and everything else. The splitting isn't perfect, but it is unreasonably good and more then good enough to be useful. With the split tracks you can mute and remix however you like. For instance, when transcribing I will put the bass at 100%, the drums at 50%, and everything else at 10% volume so I can hear the bass part well. When I have learned the song, I will put everything back to defaults and then mute the recorded bass part so I am the only bass playing. The tool also allows changing the tempo, changing the pitch, adding a metronome track (it automatically detects the tempo). It also automatically detects the chords of the song on the fly. It is first-rate.

Ultimate Guitar is both a website and an app. It is a repository of a lot of tabs and lyric. Even if there isn't a bass part, often it helps to get the chord changes from the guitar tabs section.

Reaper is a DAW (digital audio workstation). With it you can record, edit, add effects, and produce studio-quality results. There are many DAWs, but for $60 it hits a sweet spot: very capable without being very expensive. It is updated frequently, and there are a lot of youtube videos explaining how to use it. Don't be overwhelmed by all the possibilities; just learn the basics and add when you get stuck, google "how to do XYZ in reaper" and you'll expand your skills as needed without wasting time learning stuff you'll forget before you ever need to use it.

Audacity is a free, open-source program for editing audio files. People on a shoestring budget have used it to record, edit, and mix entire albums, but nobody with $60 would prefer it over Reaper. What it is good for is getting simple stuff done with a minimum of hassle.

Musescore is a free and open source music notation program. It is already pretty good, and it is rapidly getting better. It is also a website where people can share scores they've created, and you can even play the scores via a web browser without having to install anything. Programs like Sibelius have long been the professional standard, but they cost on the order of $500.

For a long time AudioStretch was available only for ios and osx, but now there is an android version, but no windows version. I have used it only a little, via an android emulator under windows, but it is pretty dang good. It is less expensive than ASD, is cheaper than ASD, looks much nicer, and in some ways is easier to use. It is missing some of the EQ options, but the other UI improvements more than make up for it.

Drum Genius 2.0 is an app that contains hundreds of different drum loop patterns, organized by style. Pick a drum pattern and try to play something along with it. At some point, Drum Genius 3.0 came out, but I don't know what new things it brings. The focus is largely on jazz, but there are some other styles in there too.

A-Tuner Lite is a free app for android that does a great job of helping tune your instrument. There are many such apps, but this one works well for me and doesn't nag about upgrading.

Metronomerous is a free metronome app for android. There are many such apps, and I've tried only a handful, but I stopped when I found this one.

Favorite Bass Musicians

In alphabetical order, these are some bassists that I have found to be especially compelling. This list would change depending what day or year you ask me, and I could easily make it twice or three times as long.

• Jack Bruce (Cream, self)
• Stanley Clarke (Return to Forever, self)
• Avishai Cohen (self)
• Jimmy Johnson (Allan Holdsworth)
• John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin)
• Tony Levin (King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, dozens more)
• Graham Maby (Joe Jackson)
• Paul McCartney (an indie band you've never heard of)
• Mike Mills (R.E.M.)
• Me'shell Ndegeocello (self)
• Jaco Pastorius (Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, self)
• Tiran Porter (Doobie Brothers)
• Chuck Rainey (Steely Dan, many many more)
• Esperanza Spalding (self)
• Chris Squire (Yes, self)
• Bruce Thomas (Elvis Costello)
• Mike Watt (fIREHOSE, self)
• Chris Wood (MM&W, Wood Brothers, John Scofield)
• Victor Wooten (Bela Fleck, self, many others)