Are you a beginning bassist? An amateur bass player looking to improve? A bass teacher looking for a comprehensive and creative method book to teach with?
If so, Foundation Exercises for Bass by Chuck Sher, author of "The Improvisor's Bass Method", is just what you've been looking for!
An instant classic, this book provides you with a complete overview of all the elements of music you will need to know to successfully play bass with others - regardless of the style of music you are interested in, or your current level of playing. Applies to acoustic or electric bass equally well.
While doing that, it will help you really enjoy the process of learning and practicing. How? By getting you to play things that sound like music to you, right from the beginning!
Divided into 33 easy-to-comprehend lessons, the book progresses from elementary to intermediate lessons on each topic, including:
• Learning where the notes on the bass are and how to make them sound like music right away.
• Learning how to hear bars of music and then how to count basic rhythms of quarter notes and eighth notes.
• A painless way to learn to read music, starting with fingerboard diagrams.
• Organizing the notes on the bass into major, minor and mixolydian scales, with a logical sequence of exercises on each, leading to the ability to create your own bass lines in each mode.
• Learning correct hand positions, fingerings and how to shift between positions on the bass.
• Basic ear training exercises designed to help you progressively discover your own musical voice on bass.
• More rhythm lessons emphasizing improvising around the signposts of beats 1 and 3, and then learning to hear and play off of "target beats" so that every eighth note in a bar feels like home to you.
• Learning where the arpeggio notes of major, minor and dominant 7th chords are on the bass, and fun ways to turn them into real music right away.
• An elegant system of learning how to connect the roots of chord progressions using arpeggios, scale notes and chromatic notes, creating instant bass lines that will work in any style of music.
• A system for learning and practicing "licks" in each of the main tonalities.
• More rhythm studies starting with playing all the eighth notes in a bar and gradually eliminating more and more of them until you are easily playing highly syncopated lines.
• Creative ways to practice various aspects of one tonality - including interval studies, scale chords, pentatonics, the blues scales, chromatic passing notes, etc.
• Sample bass grooves in different styles of music, including the blues.
• An overview of how harmony works in popular music so that the chords of tunes become comprehensible to you.
• And much more! 87 pages, $24. (For bass teachers, this is a gold mine of ready-to-use lessons for all your students.)
