Every tune begins with a single note...

I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew this time. At least for now. But we'll get to that. First, time for a little retrospective...

Okay, so I know this is my first post in a while. When queried about my silence by a fellow bass player, I explained that there's no real way to make week after week of "today I played bass for an hour" followed by "I played bass for an hour today, too" sound interesting. Practice is an accepted part of learning to do anything, and in a lot of cases, there's no real way to make what is essentially enjoyable and rewarding but repetitive grinding sound interesting.
Not that I view it as grinding of course, I've learned a lot in the past couple of months, I've been keeping busy, and I've got to grips with plenty of tunes and bass parts therein.

I suppose one of the most important things I learned to do, as silly as it sounds, is to play standing up. When I started out, I'd always play sitting down. I could see all four strings, I could see the fretboard in its entirety, no problems there. Figuring though, that very few bassists get to play sitting down all their carreers, I thought I should probably learn to play standing up.

Bam! Can't see all four strings anymore, and I have to look down to see the fretboard, like a driver glancing at the steering wheel to try and learn where he's headed. There's still some of that, but thankfully, [my small degree of] experience and muscle memory are starting to come to the fore and I'm now in the comfortable fuzzy stage where I can play while staring out of the window, and still generally hit the right notes.

I haven't really settled on an absolute and distinct sound at the moment, I tend to use the preamp and boost the bass/mids/trebles by 50%/30%/20% respectively. VPF and VLE are turned to full, and the end result is generally a full warm sound with little finger scratching or twanging.

As well as getting to grips with the bass and the sound, I've been learning a few tunes too. The tunes that I regularly play well, or (in some cases) at least play well enough to enjoy playing along now number about forty. So that's an improvement as well. Some parts are more advanced than others.

I remember how proud I was when I learned to play my first tune, have a listen:

Nice simple tune, but when I got through it I still had a "yeah, now I can play something!" moment.
Looking back several months later, and I smile at how pleased with myself I was, considering that the bass part for the tune probably couldn't be any simpler and still be called a bass part.

But that's not the point, people change and people grow, particularly quickly if they're musicians. Today's hard-to-play tune is tomorrow's "that's actually pretty easy". 7 months ago, I didn't know anything about the Bass and I felt pretty pleased with myself when I learned to play my first scale.

And now I've set myself a huge mountain to climb, and I've done it on purpose.

Jamiroquai's Love Foolosophy, with its rather awesome bass part by Nick Fyffe (not Stu Zender, as I found out to my surprise - Stu left the band earlier than I thought, I guess), is my new challenge. And it's currently above my skill level in three main criteria. Have a look:

"Bloody hell", my common sense says. "You've been playing bass for seven months and you want to play that?!". Well, yep. That's how you learn.

What we're looking at here, is (to me) a pretty fast-paced part. Sure it's not a particularly fast song, but the notes/bar ratio is way higher than anything I've played so far. So the three problems, no, not problems, opportunities to learn here are:

• Popping: In the pop, the bassist will use the index or middle finger of the plucking hand to snap the strings (usually the higher D and G strings) away from the body of the bass, causing them to bounce off the fretboard; this produces a prominent buzzing tone with a sharp attack and more high-frequency vibrations than present in plucked bass. - Wikipedia.
  I know how to do it in theory, and I can do it one note at a time when I don't have to dance around the strings, but this's the first tune that I'll actually be required to incorporate it into. I'm not that good at it to be honest but I'll get plenty of practice, and I think it's only three seperate notes (repeated multiple times) throughout the tune.
• Dexterity: Okay, so it's a busy tune as I've said. The bassist is all over the fretboard, dashing from one note to another at a speed that - at the minute - makes my eyes glaze over. I've never played anything this fast, so it's going to take a while to get up to that speed. There are a lot of mini notes that seem to fall between the actual notes, if that makes sense. Little accents and flourishes, and they're gonna be tricky to pick up too.
• Double-finger Plucking: At the bridge (2:13) there's a lot of double-finger plucking, hitting the same (in this case) note over and over with alternate fingers. This, frankly, is not something I do well. None of the tunes I've played so far have included it, my middle finger dexterity is kinda weak (hah, fit that into a conversation). This kinda ties in with dexterity, and it's something I'm going to need to work on.

So it's quite the challenge, and I'm probably going to need to learn this thing bar by bar, in addition to developing the three skills listed above. Thankfully, like a lot of bass parts, once you get over the initial high-speed insanity, you find that a lot of it is actually pretty repetitive. Meaning that on the face of it I don't need to learn "the whole song", I need to learn the chorus and bridge, and repeat them where they're needed. It still amounts to the same amount of time playing, and I'm sure there are little differences in the various areas throughout the song, but at least it breaks the tune down into manageable chunks.

Yeah. Three new skills, one in-betweeny bit, one chorus, and one bridge. This's gonna take me a while to get to grips with folks.
But by the time I have, I'll be much more skilled than I am now, and I'll have spent hours enjoying improving those skills.

And that folks, is one of the reasons why I play :).

A Minor note, something I realised later on.
When I manage to nail this tune, I'll have finally used almost the entire range of the bass, from (nearly) the highest note on the fretboard to the lowest.
I guess that's something cool too :).