Practice, Practice, Practice

I started splitting music practice time between bass and guitar this week, to get back to improving my bass skills again. It's harder for me to get myself to focus on bass than guitar at this point, because it's harder to improve on bass after playing it all these years, while guitar is still new to me and there's an amazing amount of new territory to cover. It's also more fun to sing while playing guitar by itself than while playing bass by itself.

On the other hand, I can take on much more technical challenges on bass. I had the pleasure this week of coming up with a very new approach to practice that should leave me with a few new melodic tricks up my sleeve, once I smooth out some rough edges. After all these years, it's really refreshing to find something new to do that doesn't feel like a gimmick.

I tried checking out instructional DVDs for bass on Netflix, but didn't find much of worth to me. Most of it was too basic to be helpful, and the ones that weren't seem to leap directly to the other extreme of being the showy stuff that doesn't have much practical value unless you do a lot of soloing, which I don't. I already know how to slap and pop for the rare song I play that calls for it, and tapping seems like I'd spend a lot of practice time on a skill I'll virtually never use. I suppose it'd be good to have it available to me, from the viewpoint of general mastery of the instrument, but it hardly seems worth the time compared to learning guitar or keyboards. I think I'll give at least one of those DVDs a try, though, to see if there is anything I can use.