How to practise

The best way to develop your playing is to play your exercises as often as you can. We have all heard the expression that ‘practice makes perfect’.

The truth is that repetition makes us good at doing something. The reason is that your brain and your body work together remembering how you do something and they use this information to understand when it feels good and when it feels wrong. It is often referred to as muscle memory as our body seems to learn the movements.

The more often you practise kicking a ball against a wall, the better you get at it. Accordingly, the more often you go through your bass lesson exercises the better you will become at playing them.

However, always make sure that you are practising them correctly, otherwise you just get good at getting it wrong.

Make sure that you:

pay attention to the bass tracks on the media files;
practise at slow tempos to begin with so that you can check what you are doing;
count out loud, so that you know where you are and that you are actually reading what you are playing.

Once you feel that you are getting it right, you can use your midi bass guitar to record your performance and check it back. You can save that file so that you can look back at a later date to see how much you have improved.

Additionally, it is a good idea to play along to your favourite CDs and see if you can play the grooves in time with the songs. Do not worry that you are not playing exactly what the bassist on the track is doing for the moment, just play along and see how you get on.

Remember that you can gradually develop your ability to play faster by increasing the tempo on your BassXtractor. The play-along media files on your BassXtractor can change tempo, unlike your CDs, so that is a good way of building up your speed so that you can eventually play along with the faster tracks on your favourite albums.

You finished this lesson, well done. Share your achievement with your friends!

Next: Lesson 5 | Lesson Index