Anybody Familiar with Mel Bay's Electric Bass Method?

ermghoti

a good kind of terrible
My girlfriend picked this book up. It assumes the player will be using fingers rather than a pick. On the first exercises, the half note and whole note studies have down stroke symbols on the first measures, but it also designates picking fingers with one or two dots. It is the only time the symbols are used anywhere, and there's not any explanation other than calling them down strokes. Why the distinction, when, aside from popping, which isn't covered in this work, there's only one way to finger-pick, and it's not literally a down stroke anyway?
 
Ah. I looked over it, other than having nothing interesting songwise, it didn't seem too useless. I'll look at Hal for comparison though.
 
Yeah, googled up the HL book, it's much closer to the way I would teach somebody. She's got a GC credit, so the three book set looks like a go.
 
The Hal Leonard is by noted Bass Whisperer Ed Friedland and is excellent. Accept no imitations.

It occurred to me last night as I drifted in and out of sleep that the samples of the Hal book on their sire reminded me of the Mel book I learned guitar from. I guess Mel whiffed on the four string.

Thanks, guys and/gals.
 
I took some time to page through a few exercises. Yup. It's definitely much better. The MB is basically a few exercises, and would absolutely require an instructor for a beginner to glean any value from it, the HL book nearly stands alone. Also, the spiral bound format of the three book set is really nice, it can be laid flat, has permanent envelopes for the discs, and should hold up much better than a stapled tome.
 
My only quibble so far is there doesn't seem to be much mention of muting unplayed strings or controlling duration. That's something I do situationally with either hand in various ways depending on what's available and what needs to ring, so it would bear some explanation.
 
My only quibble so far is there doesn't seem to be much mention of muting unplayed strings or controlling duration. That's something I do situationally with either hand in various ways depending on what's available and what needs to ring, so it would bear some explanation.

I think the intent early on is to just get the person playing. You can clean up technique later.
 
My only quibble so far is there doesn't seem to be much mention of muting unplayed strings or controlling duration. That's something I do situationally with either hand in various ways depending on what's available and what needs to ring, so it would bear some explanation.

There's a lot of talk about that and some embedded videos further discussing string deadening in the talkbass thread Howie linked above.
 
There's a lot of talk about that and some embedded videos further discussing string deadening in the talkbass thread Howie linked above.

One of the things I learned at the time was the floating thumb technique. I wasn't very good at it though and eventually went back to the pick, which allows me to mute instinctively, as I do on guitar.
 
One of the things I learned at the time was the floating thumb technique. I wasn't very good at it though and eventually went back to the pick, which allows me to mute instinctively, as I do on guitar.

I play bass more like Sting in that my hand is basically resting on or near the bridge and I use unemployed fingers or the edge of my palm to mute the unplayed strings...sometimes both.
 
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