Become A Bass Technique Ninja... "The Ultimate String Crossing Exercise" (L#133)

When practising technique, bass players in general tend to focus on running scales up and down the neck trying to reach that “warp-factor” speed they’ve heard bass players such as Jaco Pastorius, Gary Willis and Matt Garrison achieve.

The big problem with simply running up and down scales to hone your technique is that it’s only focusing on linear type runs. If you dissect and transcribe the bass lines and solos of the greats you’ll find that linear lines are only a tiny part of the bigger picture, in fact these players are using lots of bigger interval leaps within their solos and bass lines.

How do I know this?

Because I made the same mistake.

I practiced scales regularly to build up my speed, but when it came to playing faster lines using arpeggio type shapes across the neck which include much more string crossing type movements my solos started to sound messy and my muting pretty much left the building ;)

So…

I got back in the shed and devised some really great technique exercises that specifically catered for making bigger interval jumps around the neck and focused much more on string crossing than the linear type runs I was practicing before.

It’s not that I was wasting my time by running up and down scales to improve my speed - it was just that I was only focusing on a small fraction of what I needed too.

When I added the new exercises into my practice time the results were great, and I’ve had constant success when using these types of exercises with my students.

In this lesson I’m going to show you one of these exercises so you can add it into your practice time and really start to move around the fretboard freely.

As always, see you in the shed…

Scott :)