Okay so! I’ve got a five string electric bass. I took bass lessons in high school but that was years ago and I didn’t have a bass for a while. I’ve bought a new one and I want to .
Can anyone give me recommendations on how to teach / re-teach myself the bass? I don’t really have a sense of what I’m doing other than “switch string to go down four semitones”. My plan was to type “bass scales” into YouTube and Google and just… do whatever it said.
I would look on YouTube for tutorials on bass lines from music you like. There’s also lots of jam-along type tracks that you can just noodle on.
The pentatonic scale helped me a lot because it provides a path from the fat strings to the little ones without my neck hand having to move left or right. When I learned the bass is usually tuned the same as guitars, the bass suddenly seemed a lot less mysterious. If you were to practice the pentatonic on a guitar, you would be studying the bass at the same time. You may want to practice playing the same notes on both instruments.
If you like improvising, I recommend going to u-tub and searching for “jam tracks” or “backing tracks”. An available option is to enable “Loop”, which a musician might need so s/he can keep hammering away.
