Customer Reviews

How To Play Bass Guitar (Acorn Basic Lessons)

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...but this book is a good introduction to the bass. No, there's not a lot of pictures other than the most basic fingering techniques, and it doesn't have a bunch of "hot licks". However, it contains all the fundamentals you need to start playing bass. It goes through all the major/minor scales, chords, the circle of fifths, blues progressions; in other words, it teaches you "how to play bass guitar". I played trombone for 8-9 years so I knew the scales & how to read bass clef, but I still needed to know how to translate that to the bass. This book works just fine for that.

My opinion on this book- skip it. You would probably have an easier time learning to play on your own. Amazon has a couple of books that are way better than this one. The pictures aren't that descriptive or helpful. The overall explanation of how to play is not specific or descript. I looked at this book in order to learn to play for the first time, and I was just about as well off as I was before I got the book. In fact, I got frustrated and threw the book away. Maybe the title of the book was a mistake. The content seemed too have been written for a moderate or expert bass player.

I use this book to teach my bass guitar students, mostly because it is very sequential and it does not use tab. It teaches notes in half/first position, one string at a time, using enharmonic spelling and only using standard notation. Eventually students can play a chromatic scale in first position and then are ready to play simple duets or songs.

I don't think I'd recommend this book for "do-it-yourselfers," but then again I don't recommend trying to teach yourself an instrument anyway.

If you want to stand out as a musician, let alone a bass guitarist, learn to read music in standard notation and chord symbols, and learn a variety of styles and genres of music. This book can help you do that, if used in conjuction with private instruction and a good teacher.

If you have a teaching studio and teach bass guitar, this book provides a solid method that actually teaches fluency on the instrument and standard notation - highly recommended.

This is a tough book to learn from. It assumes you are a beginner to music but then proceeds to have you reading staff with very few hints and no tablature. I concede that reading staff is a good thing though, not enough guitarists learn to read staff. The book often sticks to strict music theory when constructing chords and has notes with double flats or marks a natural note as a flat (for example Fb) instead of writing it as the actual note. This is extremely confusing for someone new to music. As if that weren't enough, none of the exercises are the least bit interesting. Just a bunch of chord patterns through the circle of fifths. When the book finally gets into some real music, does it have you play actual bass lines? No, instead it has you play a Bach minuet. Who plays classical minuets on an electric bass? If someone had the will power to stay awake from cover to cover, I'm sure they could become proficient at reading music and playing it on the bass. The problem with this book is that it is too tedious and boring to capture a beginning bassist's attention.