I don’t want to take the focus away from learning the drums on this site, but sometimes people enjoy being multi instrumentalists. The bass guitar is a nice fretted and stringed instrument to learn if you enjoy the drums. The bass and drums work together to tie together the beat, groove, rhythm and chords of a song. Because the bass guitar has the ability to play notes and chords like a guitar or piano and follows the beat of the bass drum in a song it ties everything together.
This is no more noticeable then when you take the bass guitar away in a song. The bass may be missed to the normal ear until you take it away. That’s when you will really notice that it was once there but now the song feels like it’s missing something.
It’s ones of the first bass guitar lessons you’d take that would explain how the bass guitar usually plays the root note for the chords in a song and follows along with the beat from the bass drum.
This unique mix gives a groove to song. It’s the concept that less is more when it comes to the bass guitar since rarely will a bassist be playing chords on their instrument during a song that also has a piano player or guitarist.
Here are a few tips if you’re interested in learning bass guitar.
- Learn the fretboard. This is the most important tip and is easily done if you focus on major and minor scales. This will let you know where a particular note can be found all over the fret board and give you versatility for how you play along with other rhythm instruments such as guitar or piano.
- Start with a 4 string bass. While many people feel more strings are better they are only going to confuse you when first starting out. Get the four strings down before you move up to five or six strings.
- Practice is key. Like playing the drums you need to practice to get better, and practice little things until you get them perfect. A good rule of thumb is if you can play something ten times quickly without error you’ve got it under your fingers and you can move on to something new.
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There are a few great rock drummers I can think of that come to mind who can also rock out on the guitar pretty hard. One of them that most of us are familiar with is Dave Grohl, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Foo Fighters and formally the Drummer for Nirvana and has also stood in as the drummer for a variety of popular rock acts both in studio and also on tour.