Jump n’Blues Bass by Keith Rosier

Now looking at: Jump n’Blues Bass by Keith Rosier

As I’m going to play at a blues festival I have put out of the shelves some blues bass book I have.

So let’s start with this book: Jump n’ Blues.
After going through this book I would rather have called it Jump IN bass as it serves more as an intro for people willing to play the bass.
The author explains topics like choosing between an electric bass and an upright bass, what kind of strings are more appropriate, how to get the right blues tone, what kind of equipment you need for recording, and brief introduction about how

Slap It: Funk Studies for the Electric Bass by Tony Oppenheim

Let’s talk about: Slap It: Funk Studies for the Electric Bass by Tony Oppenheim

Slap is one technique that soon or later a bassist is going to try. So when I wanted to start I thought: Let’s buy the most acclaimed book on this subject, Slap It! And really it deserves all the buzz. The bass lines are good and challenging.

Oppenheim starts with open string, hammer-on and lift-off, muting notes and octave exercise. After that you will get about 110 bass lines, of which 80 will be recorded on the accompanying CD featuring Michael Clarke on drums and

Simplified Sight-Reading for Bass by Josquin des Pres

This post will be about the book: Simplified Sight-Reading for Bass by Josquin des Pres

When I started to play bass I could not read in bass clef, I had studied guitar one year and, as the local band needed a bass player, I switched on lower note. Reading bass line was a painful process; I had to figure out every note counting down to find it. Tablature was rare and transposing software was far away to come (it was 1984). So after a while I purchased this book, attracted by

Bass Grooves: Develop Your Groove and Play Like the Pros in Any Style

This post is about: Bass Grooves: Develop your Groove and Play Like the Pros in Any Style by Ed Friedland

Who is, as bass player, your closer relative? You guess it: the drummer. He is your mate, your fellow, so the best thing is to get to know them well. Ok I’m joking, but the purpose of this book seems to me about that: knowing the mechanism that make up a style. Instead of giving you a hundred of bass lines, one after another, this book is about how bass and drum lines relate together. Ed Friedland does that by inviting you to program your drum-machine (and he mean a drum-machine not a metronome) according to the different style presented. By doing so you will get insight on both side of

Bass Fitness by Josequin des Pres (Bass Builders - Hal Leonard)

Let’s talk about: Bass Fitness by Josequin des Pres.
When I first saw this book years ago in a Music store book department I thought it was not worth even with its cheap price: only chromatic exercise, no CD included and so on. But then, one day I spoke to another bass player about his velocity and finger independence and he told me that the most valuable source for him was: Bass Fitness by Josequin des Pres. So some day after I went back to that music store and bought this book: I could not have done better. In a couple of month I was able to push

Building Walking Bass Lines by Ed Friedland (Bass Builders - Hal Leonard)

Now I’m going to talk about: Building Walking Bass Lines by Ed Friedland (Bass Builders - Hal Leonard).

As you may have noticed in previous posts I’m a big fan of Ed Friedland bass books because I think he puts his best effort to make bass topics easy to understand even for beginning bass players and this book is no exception.
Explaining a concept like walking bass is not so easy but Ed Friedland does a very good job by getting you gradually to understand, in the first part of the book, the relation between root and fifths. He starts with root and a “two feel” (half notes), moving to “four feel” and then letting you freely improvise. You will than going to know the

Reggae Bass by Ed Friedland (Bass Builders - Hal Leonard)

Today I’m going to talk about: Reggae Bass by Ed Friedland (Bass Builders - Hal Leonard).

I’ve found this book very interesting because it does not only give about 47 nice reggae bass lines to follow, either in notation and in tablature, but every line has a brief description about where it was taken and some theory advice. That’s not so usual with this kind of “bass lines compilation books” and really give an added value to it. All riddims, as the author call them, are in historical order, so after a historic description of Reggae music and some