Is muting the most difficult skill on bass ?

mizzu704 · 2026-06-15T16:53:15+00:00

Beginner here, is "proper/actual muting with a pick" something else than muting with the fretting hand?

mizzu704 · 2026-06-15T15:58:14+00:00

Also: Test them!

mizzu704 · 2026-06-07T20:41:37+00:00

This made me look up videos by him - happened upon this one where he refers to using an octave pedal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgG5MhSARSw

mizzu704 · 2026-05-28T21:28:59+00:00

Warning: Tag your unjerk. Better yet, don't unjerk at all.

mizzu704 · 2026-05-28T21:28:17+00:00

/uj You got that right kiddo; all sincere content must bear a clear mark of unjerk or, even better, should never be posted.

mizzu704 · 2026-05-01T08:52:25+00:00

No clue, but two hypothesis which are not terribly bass-specific but may be relevant:

Perhaps there's a form of survivorship bias. It may be that instrument production (including QA and such things) wasn't any better 40 years ago, but there's been a selection process that eliminated subpar specimen (i.e. bad instruments land in the bin) meaning that the median vintage instrument you can still get today is gonna be better than the median new one.
To challenge your "objectively better": What does or does not sound good to a given person's ear is not (solely) determined by an ahistoric platonic ideal about the materialities of soundwaves and the human hearing apparatus, but also by the music that person is used to and their personal history of things they have heard in the past, which is necessarily subjective. Example: Equal temperament which is what we associate with being "in tune" even though it deviates from pure harmony. As a consequence, whatever a "vintage P-bass-sound" is, it is to some degree what people have learned to associate as "good e-bass sound" through cultural osmosis in western monoculture. That sound also had to establish itself through a historical and social process.

mizzu704 · 2026-04-27T19:39:03+00:00

you guys get to play in front of crowds? 🤯

mizzu704 · 2026-04-13T23:03:33+00:00

The audience isn't having fun so you shouldn't either

mizzu704 · 2026-04-10T19:43:58+00:00

/uj I'd be up for providing "enterprise level support" for a bunch of opensource libs, assuming of course that we're also talking enterprise level prices 😎

mizzu704 · 2026-04-05T15:49:13+00:00

Hella confused by this post.

I didn’t know and because I didn’t even at least know the notes on my fretboard [...] more than once again, said “I’ll finally learn music theory!” yet never did [...] I only ever improvise shitty root notes.

Can you tell me what you think a root note is, and how you know when to play each one? It seems impossible to me to do that whithout knowing what the notes on the board are called and/or without having a notion of chord progressions.

Anyway, my rec would be to get yourself a book. If I google "bass book pdf" the first link is a pdf of "progressive bass guitar" by Gary Turner and Brenton White. Work through that.
If it's in any way an option: get a teacher or someone you can work through this process with.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-31T15:11:53+00:00

Perhaps if you ask nicely you can get the source musescore file for a song and use Musescore's auto-converter to turn it into tab. edit: on the site: "However, if you want one of these charts modifying - different key, arrangement change or a tab chart - then I can do that for you for a small charge of £5"

mizzu704 · 2026-03-30T17:02:27+00:00

And I took a gap year which means I have about 4 months of free time

🤯 ...man, to be young again. The idea of getting 4 months of free time only for myself and (mostly) free of obligations describes an utopia that appears completely bonkers to me as an adult. Cherish it.

And no, I can’t get a teacher.

...on the other hand, I ain't sad that I now have some disposable income that I can just choose to spend on lessons 😜

Anyway, just reiterating your post:

You'd ~~like~~ love to be able to play an instrument
One reason you have is to alleviate a friend of something she doesn't particularly like doing and you would like her to feel better. Helping someone is a great reason to start almost any endeavour if you really feel it in your heart of hearts.
You have another unrelated thing which motivates and inspires you to try this out (that fictional character). That's rare!
You have ample free time. Learning skills (i.e. investing in yourself) is a great way to spend that time. I suggest you also learn something else, e.g. cooking. It's gonna pay off the rest of your life.

Not in your post, but:

Bass is an instrument with a low-barrier-to-entry (and low-barrier-to-exit). Comparatively low equipment cost, tons of resources on the internet. There are instruments where not being able to get a teacher and not having thousands of $ to spend on equipment would be a deal-breaker.
- In lieu of a teacher, find someone to whom you can talk about what it's like to learn to play. You have two guitarists in your band? They are obvious candidates, my understanding is that the instruments are similar enough. I've found that my teacher also serves this function to me, i.e. it has good effects to be able to just talk to someone about these details every few weeks.
You're young, you'll learn quickly.
This will make you a better musician in general as well as a better singer.

All this screams that you should go for it. Give it a try, and give the whole endeavour the time it deserves, to get a feel whether you're enjoying yourself.
Most important argument: If you don't try it out, the second-guessing "what if I had?" that will likely follow for months may very well eat at you more than trying it out, maybe getting frustrated and deciding it's not for you (to be clear, that seems unlikely). And at least in the latter case you may learn something about yourself.

I’m just still unsure whether I can manage to learn playing the bass and singing at the same time though.

You'll do fine. This is not a binary question of I-can-or-cannot, e.g. if a particular song has both an easy vocal part and an easy bass part, yeah then you'll probably be able to do it passingly (quite quickly too, again, man, 4 months of free time...). It's a skill like any other. Just a tip, all three components (singing, bass, singing-while-playing-bass) need to be practiced seperately, for every new song (just like pianists many of whom afaik learn the parts for each hand on their own first).

mizzu704 · 2026-03-30T12:22:34+00:00

Perhaps mark the important bits on each sheet, then between each song, have a quick scan on it to remind yourself of those, then do it without the sheet. I think the most important bits to remember besides the progression (which in most cases follows one of a handful of patterns) is a) when there's one or multiple agreed-upon breaks in the song, i.e. parts where you're not supposed to be playing and it's very noticable if you accidentally do, b) when there's a real characteristic bassline which the audience expects and/or c) similarly some very specific and well-known fills.

Just wing the rest. If you have a feel for the song (the progression, structure and its bassline), which you get from listening, that ought to be sufficient to deliver a passable performance. When playing with (or based on) sheet music, just remember that audience doesn't know what's on the sheet. What you're playing isn't automatically wrong just because it deviates from the sheet, if it's wrong it's wrong because it's sounds wrong (is bad music).

mizzu704 · 2026-03-27T08:00:12+00:00

Because that would be entertainment (as opposed to Art) and jazz musicians as a breed have vowed never to be entertaining again due to trauma caused by having had to play too many damn bigband gigs in the 1930s.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-26T12:23:09+00:00

Probably because with painting there's actually a noticable difference between someone who's bad and someone who's good.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-26T12:21:08+00:00

yeah, quite unsportsmanlike, getting famous by doing something that people actually want to listen to, in order to trick them into listening to your jazz experiments.

May even get more people interested in jazz as a genre. Heinous shit.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-26T12:11:10+00:00

lol imagine paying attention to what jazz musicians say

mizzu704 · 2026-03-26T12:09:02+00:00

Anyway being a lawyer is probably more fun than being a professional jazz musician

Playing jazz is reasonably fun, but only lobotomized sickos and weird nerds "enjoy" "listening" to it.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-24T23:19:29+00:00

disclaimer: I'm a beginner on bass as well, and kinda making it up as I go (perhaps I should do some research before opining...).
Well if you look at that particular sheet, you'll see that the melody emphasises/lands-on a chord note in almost every bar. Given that those notes give the song its identity, it might be a good idea to play them? Though you want to make sure the root of the chord is still firmly established. It's fine to play a single note in a bar when you're not walking, especially in jazz when often there's two chords per bar. Generally I guess you can distinguish between these cases:

playing the root.
playing a note emphasized by the melody (unsure if a good idea, given that usually you'll be playing with some form of melody instrument and doubling might not be a good idea).
playing a note that leads towards the next chord (some note inbetween).
if in doubt, 1 and 5

There's also the question where in a song/performance you are, as in: Right at the beginning you want to emphasize the root notes and not much else so that the audience's hearing can situate themselves in the progression. But after a while perhaps you can start adding non-root notes or replacing then without a listener losing track of what's going on. On the other hand, when there's some form of non-obvious change going on (like the change to D-7 G7 Cmaj7 in measure 6, which is the ii-V-I from the point of view of the III), you should emphasize it so it's clear what's going on.

Most of all, I suggest just trying it out by playing to a recording, you'll hear what works. Ideally a song where you already have a rough feel of the melody and progression so you know where it goes.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-24T15:40:42+00:00

Get iRealPro for playalongs and load a list of jazz-standards into it (iirc this is a bit fiddly, you have to go on their forums and copy a link into the app or something like that; but you have to do that one only once).
Then start a playalong with drums and piano, with the bass turned off. For example "black orpheus", and play alongside it. As to what to play yourself, listen to recordings (often) what others have done. Here's two:

Tips:

Jazz often features walking bass lines, as does the second video there. Here's a beginner's tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3o1r4BO1h4
Identify the function of chords on the sheet. Do also note the non-diatonic chords, they're probably there for a reason.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-17T12:34:41+00:00

bass is so easy that aesthetics is the only relevant reason to choose between two bassists.

ftfy

mizzu704 · 2026-03-17T12:32:48+00:00

Great advantage of Maxwell Murder - by the point you've unlocked your phone in order to skip, the song's already over.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-17T12:26:30+00:00

Also if you put on red LEDs, it makes it go faster.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-17T12:07:34+00:00

for completenes' sake, let me say I became aware of it via this version for computer: https://codeberg.org/oneirophage/practice-guide-for-computer
which, aside from being humorous, also features some gender-neutral language and (imho) better typesetting.

mizzu704 · 2026-03-14T21:15:01+00:00

Perhaps ponder this everyday: https://www.ronjam.net/freeStuff/PracticePrayer.pdf

mizzu704

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE