My first bass lesson was on electric bass. It was half an hour long which meant we had to focus on a few important things that would be crucial to a beginner starting with proper technique.

We talked in depth about proper technique for the left and right hands.

For the right hand:

  • You use your pointer and middle fingers as “walking fingers”. This means they alternate consistently and evenly.
  • Your thumb rests on the string that is above (physically) the string you’re playing on. For the top string your thumb can rest on the pick up.
  • You are not plucking strings upwards as you would on a violin. You are actually sliding the pad(soft section) of your singer across the string towards your thumb.

For the left hand:

  • Your fingers should be slightly bent and relaxed. The should also be parallel to the frets. You use the very end of the pad of your finger to do the fingerings.
  • Your thumb rests on the back of the neck. It should be vertically centred. Horizontally, it should follow the rest of your fingers around the neck of the bass.
  • Your fingers should press down on the string between the middle to end of the fret for a fretted bass. It would be ok to play directly on the fret as long as you didn’t go past it. For a non fretted bass you should always play directly on the “frets” (usually markings on the bass).

Terminology:

  • It is important to not that when a bass player say go up a string, they are referring to a string that is higher in pitch. This means you are actually physically moving down.
  • When they say going “up” a fret they are also referring to pitch.

I am glad I had a lesson on these specifics as I was previously learning bass completely on my own. These techniques are definitely a bit different than I was doing things and I will have habits to break now. This will be helpful to my future students to be able to teach them proper technique from the start so that they don’t have to “unlearn” bad habits.