How to Play a Bass Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Steve Bauman from Summerhays Music in Murray, Utah, and we're talking about the bass guitar today. We're going to cover just a couple basics on how to play the bass guitar. Now this is just very, very basic elementary, I mean first level if you're just picking up the bass for the very first time, then this is just kind of how to get started. And so I want to talk for a second about hand position. With the bass guitar we, you can play with a pick of course, but probably the most common way to play is with these two fingers. Now you just, alternate fingering is probably the way to go when you're just starting out. There are other techniques of course, but this is just the most common way. So you want to rest your thumb and anchor it somewhere probably on the pickup. This is called the pickup right here. And so either back on this pickup, but more likely up on this what's called the neck pickup. And you want to anchor your thumb there and kind of arch your fingers over the strings and so that you have access to them. Some easy exercises to get started is to just play maybe four notes on each string and try to alternate your fingers. I'm also muting the strings over here so that no sound comes out. Left hand position should be really just loose and comfortable. Probably your thumb just kind of gets anchored in the back here and you kind of want to be maybe a little lower than center on the, on the neck here, and just kind of loosely anchor it there and kind of have your wrist down like someone pushed your wrist down gently and kind of just, you know you've got wide access to any strings here. That's probably the best way. You don't want to clam up, you don't want to get real tight, you just kind of keep it loose and play with your fingertips. One finger per fret is a preferred way to just get started. Now of course, there's all these other ways of positioning like skipping a fret in between or anything like that, but one finger per fret is usually accepted to be a pretty good, a pretty good way to get started. The roll of a bass player in a band is to kind of form the foundation for the band to kind of build on. Now that means basically you're kind of half drummer, half guitar player. But you're more on the drummer side. You're more a rhythm, part of the rhythm section because bass lines are very repetitive and very kind of foundational. A lot of bass players refer to a groove. So out of scales and chord tone and arpeggios and things like that, that we learn, we come up with a repetitive bass line to kind of form the foundation for the band to build on. This is a very simple bass line out of a C major scale where we take some notes out of the scale and repeat a bass line over and over."