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    Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies
    Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies
    Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies
    Ebook275 pages2 hours

    Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies

    By Patrick Pfeiffer

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Learn to play bass guitar quickly and easily with this guide and bonus interactive CD!

    The bass guitar is utilized in almost every single genre of music-rock, classical, jazz, metal, funk, and country just to name a few. Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies provides bassists an opportunity to dabble with all these styles and more. Regardless of your intended musical style, this hands-on guide provides the tips and drills designed to help perfect your playing ability.

    • Features a wide variety of over 300 exercises and technique-building practice opportunities tailored to bass guitar
    • From classic blues bass rhythms to funk, rock, and reggae bass patterns, players of all styles benefit from the exercises and chords presented
    • Shows you proper hand and body posture and fingering and hand positions
    • Each lesson concludes with a music piece for you to try
    • The audio CD includes practice pieces that accompany the exercises and drills presented in each section
    • Helps you build your strength, endurance, and dexterity when playing bass

    Whether you're a beginner bass player or you're looking to stretch your playing skills, Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies is the book for you!

    CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of the e-book file, but are available for download after purchase.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateDec 14, 2010
    ISBN9780470934197
    Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies

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    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This book is amazing for intermediate bass players looking to expand their musical vocabulary and dexterity and technique across the fretboard. Certainly not "For Dummies" as the exercises combine to enhance theory knowledge in a practical sense specifically for the bass fretboard. Great book.

      3 people found this helpful

    Book preview

    Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies - Patrick Pfeiffer

    Introduction

    Lay down the groove with tight, focused notes and an irresistible feel. Flawlessly navigate the turbulent sea of rhythm and harmony. Ride the deep, articulate, sonorous sound waves of your bass guitar — and do it all with confidence, skill, grace, and joy.

    What if a book comes along that makes you a better bass player — no matter your present level — and streamlines your practice routine with efficient and effective exercises that cover all musical aspects of bass playing, including a multitude of techniques in all styles of music?

    This is that book. Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies bridges knowing and doing, or, in the case of musicians, theory and playing. Sure, it’s important to memorize certain rules, like which scales to use with which chords, but it won’t do you any good unless you have the scales firmly embedded in your muscle memory, with your hands trained to reach automatically for the proper move.

    It’s also important to develop muscle memory to play arpeggios, rhythms, grooves, and melodies, and to establish the wherewithal to apply them to different styles. You find exercises in this book to help you smooth your shifts, your string crossings, your attack, and your dynamics — exercises that don’t sound like exercises at all because they’re written as musical pieces. After all, you want to play music.

    About This Book

    The exercises in Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies go far beyond the conventional practicing of scales, arpeggios, and other etudes. These exercises are bass-specific. Playing scales straight up and down may be great for other instruments, but for bass players it doesn’t suffice. As a bassist you’re also responsible for rhythm and groove; thus, the scales in Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies resolve harmonically as well as rhythmically. In fact, many of the scale exercises in this book segue straight into grooves that you can use in real songs.

    All the exercises are tried and true, truly the best stuff on earth. You can improve your playing literally within days just by doing the exercises. Of course, I don’t expect you to play all 227 or so etudes in one day! I group the exercises so that several address each issue, but in slightly different ways. For example, you get to work all four fingers of your fretting hand whether you’re practicing permutations or shifting.

    Some exercises are short — only a measure or two — and some are quite lengthy, sometimes two pages. I encourage you to transpose each exercise into all keys, even if the exercise is presented in only one. The bass is symmetrical; therefore, your fingering doesn’t change, which makes transposing the music an easy task.

    At the end of this book you find a list of techniques, including the order in which to practice them. This is definitely not a book you need to read from front to back, in chronological order. In fact, after you read this introduction, I recommend that you skip to the last chapter to see why it’s worth practicing the exercises in Bass Guitar Exercises For Dummies. There you find examples of exercises applied to famous bass-heavy music, and I assure you, you’ll recognize at least some of these

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