Hi, and welcome to Week One of Bass Lessons in the music coach program. We're gonna get started on a great journey today playing the electric bass guitar. Now, you may have had some experience playing a regular six string guitar before, or maybe you've had no experience at all. But we're going to start by learning the basic fundamentals today that are going to help you become really, really solid on the bass. The bass is a great instrument, it usually has the role in a band of providing a lot of stability, both in terms of the rhythm and the harmony that goes underneath all the music. So it's a very powerful position inside of a band.

Not often tons of fanfare and recognition, but it's extremely important and whenever you play in a band where the bass is really solid and it's really working well especially with the drums It creates a real kind of magic. So to get started, we're going to talk a little bit about the parts of the instruments. And then how we put where we put our fingers to make notes, and the names of the strings. So to start off with, like a regular guitar, we talked about the parts of it like a person. So there's the head of the instrument, the neck and the body. Now, because this instrument is electric, it plugs into an amplifier which I have sitting beside me.

And there's going to be a separate video to just talk about amplifiers and cables and things like that, so that we don't have to spend our time in the lesson working on that. But if so, if you're not sure of how to connect your bass to the amplifier, go check out that video. The bass has four strings, and they're the same names as the lowest four strings on a guitar. So if you've played a guitar before this will be easier to remember. They are he has the biggest string which is closest to your head and your one string small is a then we go to the next string is D, and the last string is G. If you're not sure about how to use the musical alphabet, check out some of the pre course videos that explain how we use the alphabet in music. Now on the bass, you're going to notice that there are some metal strips in the neck and some dots that are both on the top of the neck and in the front of the neck.

Now the frets divide up the neck and allow you to play notes by pushing down a string between two frets. And wherever you're pushing down, you want to push your fingers right in the middle, not right on the metal strip, but right in between. And the reason why they have dots is because they're numbered. So when a string is played open, it's considered fret zero. And when we push down in the first fret, it's fret number one. Number two, number three, and so on.

And the dots are on the odd numbers, so 3579 and then there's a double.at 12, which is an octave. And again, if you're not quite sure about how octaves work, in the pre course video, there's going to be some explanation of that. For this week's practice video, what you're going to work on is memorizing and being able to play all the strings. It might seem like a small task, but it's really important to know the name of the string that you're on all the time, and to be able to do it going both forwards and backwards. So I'm going to do it one time so you can see again, be a de GG de D, A, E Now with your right hand, you can play the bass with a pic. The more traditional way to play it is with your fingers.

And usually you're going to use your first two fingers. For now you can even just use your pointer finger. So a common way to do it is to rest your thumb on the pickup that's closest to your body. And this provides some balance and a place of reference so that you can feel how far away your finger is from the pickup. So we just pluck it lightly because the instruments electric you don't need to pull very hard. If your hands are a little smaller and reaching that far is difficult, you can just let your hand float like that.

If you're ready for something even a little more complicated, you can alternate first finger second finger, first finger All right, we'll see you in the practice video.