Customer Reviews

Mel Bay You Can Teach Yourself Electric Bass (You Can Teach Yourself)

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This was the book I purchased leaving the music store after getting my first bass. I sat at home and learned how to read the notes in the first position, mastered tablature reading and even learned the C Major Scale in the first position. But the only problem was that the book gave zero application possiblities for any of the things I took my time to learn. It was a good thing that I immediately enrolled in private bass lessons or I probably would've gotten frustrated with this four-string beast and quit the instrument. I really don't recommend this book to anyone. It has a few slap lines to learn and could improve your music reading abilities, but other than that it is useless.

Check out on of the following...
The Evolving Bassist-Rufus Reid
The Jazz Bass Book-John Goldsby
The berklee bass practice method

In theory, this book also is available for purchase with a cassette or a CD. The paperback book alone really is not very helpful for a bass novice. Being able to hear the music would be more helpful. However, right now, no one seems to have the book for sale with the CD or with the cassette. Good luck!

I've been playing bass for 1 1/2 years now and have been an adequate guitar player for 25 years. This was the first bass book I opened and used (I own about 10 now). I would _not_ use this book without a teacher since it has little to no explaination. However, I find myself continually coming back to it because it has such a nice survey of skills with easy-to-recognize-from-the-radio bass patterns from blues/funk/rock. For example, I needed to review basic walking bass last week and 20 basic blues/rockandroll walks with variations were there for me to work on but only enough to keep me busy for a week or two at my current level of playing. This is a good book for learning to read tab and learning _basic_ notation for bass. Another strength is an emphasis on using the entire fretboard through the practice of major and minor modes. The funk section is great but only if you are already very familiar with the genre. A CD would greatly improve this section.