Electric Bass

At a glance

Role

Bass — the root of the harmony and the bottom of the groove

Range

E1 – G4 (as written)

Transposition

Written at pitch but sounding an octave lower — the key you read is the key it is in.

Tuning

E1A1D2G2▶ all

previewed with the electric piano voice

Sits well in

EADGFB♭

Open-string keys ring; F and B♭ are where most horn-driven material lives.

How it works

Magnetic pickups turn string vibration into a signal; there is no acoustic body worth speaking of. Frets make pitch exact, so everything expressive lives in the right hand.

On the neck

Drills 3

A session's worth. Each one has a single point — do that, not the whole list.

1. Roots on the one6 min

   The single most important note in the bar, landing exactly.

   1. Pick a song with a measured BPM from the library.
   2. Play only the root of each chord, only on beat 1, for the whole song.
   3. Mute everything else. Silence is most of the part.
2. Right-hand evenness5 min

   Two plucking fingers that sound like one.

   1. Alternate index and middle on one open string, eighth notes at 70 bpm.
   2. Record ten seconds and listen for the weaker finger.
   3. Raise the tempo only when they match.
3. Root–fifth–octave shapes6 min

   One shape that works from any root on any string.

   1. Play root, fifth (two frets up, one string over), octave (two frets up, two strings over).
   2. Move it through the chords of a song in the library.
   3. Then use only roots and fifths to play the whole song.

Tips

• Left-hand fingers stay close to the strings — muting the strings you are not playing is half the job.
• The tone knob is a technique. Rolling it back makes a sloppy line sound intentional.
• Learn songs by their bass line, not their chord chart. You will remember them longer.

Heard on 0

Nothing linked yet. The pipeline never measures who plays what, so this list is human-curated: add recordings to the 🎙️ Recordings relation on this instrument's row in 🎻 MUSIC INSTRUMENTS [DB] and they show up here.

Worth practising on it

Suggested from what the pipeline measured — key, meter, tempo and the chords as played. Each one says why it is here.