But you notice that your favourite player is sat in his tracksuit on the sideline.  Talking to your other two favourite players.  So you wonder over, and ask them when they’re going to train.  And they say something like: ‘I’m not training today.  I had to file a VAT return for my accountant and I don’t feel like training.’

You’d feel cheated right?  Because these are professional athletes.  Training is part of what they get paid vast amounts of money for.  It’s part of their job.  In reality they’d only get out of training if they were injured.  Or ill.

What’s this got to do with learning to play the bass?

Well the practice that we do is the equivalent of a professional athlete’s training.  And unless we’re very lucky, no-one’s paying us for the time we’re investing in trying to get better at the bass.

And I’ve talked about in previous articles that the best way to make consistent improvements is by using the principles of Deliberate Practice, and specifically the concept of staying in ‘the learning zone’ so that you’re always working on challenging exercises.

But you know what? Deliberate Practice is hard work.  And we’re human.  And life happens, whether we like it or not.  Sometimes we have crappy days and don’t feel like practicing.  Last week I had to stay up until 2 AM to schedule accounts for my main business and then email it to my Accountant so he could file my VAT return.  And the next day I felt pretty lousy and didn’t want to practice.

Or you have days when you feel sick.  Or your partner’s sick.  Or your kids or your dog are sick.  And often when you finally carve out some time on those days you just don’t feel like practicing.  You feel like watching a Movie.  Or the latest episode of ’24.’ Or ‘Lost.’  Or reading a book.  Or whatever.  Just not practicing.

So what do you do on a day when you don’t feel like practicing?

There’s 3 approaches you can take.

The first approach is obvious.  You can decide that for today you just don’t feel like it, and you’re going to have a day off, take some down time and come back the next day refreshed and raring to go.

The second approach is also obvious.  You decide that you’re just going to practice anyway.

The third approach is not so obvious.  You decide that you’re going to practice, but that you’re going to practice in The Comfort Zone and not in The Learning Zone.

I thought the whole point of Deliberate Practice was to practice in The Learning Zone?  Why would we practice in The Comfort Zone?

As I’ve said before Deliberate Practice is hard.  There’s only so much of it you can do in a day because it’s mentally tiring due to the intense focus you have to bring to bear on your practice.  And if you’re feeling crappy trying to apply Deliberate Practice to a full session can end up being counter productive and leave you giving up your session early in frustration.

So this is why we turn to the Comfort Zone.  By definition activities in the Comfort Zone are things you can already do relatively easily.  So when this happens to me I simply step back two or three weeks in my virtual Practice Journal (an Excel Spreadsheet if you really want to know) and pick an exercise that’s related to what I SHOULD have been practicing, but one that’s far more comfortable.  And I practice that instead.

Sometimes 10 or 15 minutes of this warms up your brain and you can switch from Comfort Zone activity to Learning Zone activity for the rest of your session.  But sometimes it doesn’t.

The worst case scenario is that I’ve spent my practice session solidifying my understanding of a particular technique or musical application.  You’ve got to be careful though – lots of sessions like this lead – as we’ve seen in previous articles – to stagnation and the mythical ‘plateau.’

But for the odd practice session, remember you’re human and don’t beat yourself up about it.  Life happens.

I can’t even face doing ‘Comfort Zone’ practicing.  I want to give it a miss today…

If you genuinely feel like that then there’s probably no benefit to be gained by forcing yourself to practice.  When this happens to me – which is usually when I’m ill or recovering from illness, or more often when one of my kids is ill – I give myself permission to miss a session.

There’s a but though.

If I miss a session I either make up the time later on in the week OR I listen to something so stimulating that the missed session won’t be repeated the next day.

Actually I’m not telling the truth, I do both.  On the day I miss a practice session I immerse myself in music that’s so utterly inspiring that I find my fingers playing ‘air bass’ AND then I usually add 10 minutes a day to my normal practice schedule until the time has been made up.

So let’s summarize what to do when we don’t feel like practicing (for whatever reason).

We can practice anyway.  We can practice at a lesser intensity.  Or we can listen to music so great that we find ourselves playing ‘air bass.’

Before we get to the fortunate position of being paid to get better there’s two things you need to remember: We’re only human.  Life happens.

Click on the link if you want to know more about Deliberate Practice.

And if you’re anything like me you’ve barely scratched the surface of this information.  Some of my DVDs are still in their cellophane shrink wrapping, some of the books I’ve maybe glanced at once or twice and that’s it.

But it wasn’t always like this.

How It Used To Be

Back in the day when I started playing (circa 1978) there were only a handful of instructional books available.  And VHS hadn’t been invented – and the digital stuff like DVDs and Podcasts and the Internet were just science fiction.

So what you did was that you got a book, and you worked through it from start to finish.  There were no drum machines to program grooves to help you practice, so you kept time with the aid of a clockwork metronome.

But read the first sentence of the last paragraph again.  “So what you did was you got a book, and you worked through it from start to finish.”  Sounds pretty revolutionary doesn’t it, getting an instructional book and working through to the end?

But it shouldn’t be revolutionary.  That should be the norm, not the exception.  And there’s two main reasons why most of today’s bass students don’t take a book and work it from front to back.

The First Reason: Most Bass Students Don’t Have Goals

Bass Students that don’t have goals are looking for a quick fix.  They want to learn a bunch of cool licks, or a showy technique that impresses people.  And so they skim, looking for information that will help give them their fix.

If you ever want to see a skimmer in action all you’ve got to do is head over to your local music store on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll find a horde of them slapping and tapping maniacally on basses they’ve got no interest in buying.  They just want to show off the licks and tricks that they’ve skimmed from the latest Victor Wooten DVD.  Or Billy Sheehan DVD.  Or Bass Player Magazine.  Or wherever.

But the problem is not just with students that don’t have goals, there’s also an inherent problem with a lot of the instructional material out there.

The Second Reason: The Instructional Material Available Is Often Poorly Presented

There’s some really good information out there, that can help bass students become better players.  But there’s a strange paradox because a lot of the guys authoring this material are actually not that great at teaching it.

A great deal of the really important “how you apply the material” is taken for granted – when beginner bass players, and maybe intermediates too, need a lot more hand holding and detailed guidance on how to actually implement the material being taught.

This is not just a modern day occurrence, it was a problem back in the day too, I just didn’t have the experience to perceive it.  And the guys (and gals) who taught me either didn’t know either, or weren’t too bothered – which ends up amounting to the same thing.

But even though a great deal of the instructional material is poorly presented there are ways of using it effectively to become a better bass player.

So How Can You Make The Most of The Instructional Material That’s Out There?

You need two things to take advantage of the mountain of instructional material that’s available.  Firstly you need to have clear and specific goals on what you want to achieve as a bass player.  Only once these goals have been articulated can you go about finding instructional material that will help you achieve them.

The second thing you need is to have a system in place to take advantage of the instructional material that you’ve identified as being in alignment with your goals.  This system should divide the instructional material into manageable chunks and then take you step by step from the easiest material to the hardest material, with time allowed to practice the chunks of information on your bass so that you actually assimilate it.

The best system I know of to do this is called Deliberate Practice.  Just for the record it’s not something I invented, it’s been documented before, but never with reference to the bass guitar.
OK.  How Do I Make Sure I’m Using This System On The Best Information Available?

The amount of information must be bewildering to beginners, or people thinking about starting the bass.  There are some ways however of filtering out information that is simply not relevant.

The first filter is setting goals for yourself.  By working out what you actually want to achieve you can probably exclude a good 75% of the information that’s out there.

The next filter you can use is to check reviews at Amazon.com.  Or make a post on TalkBass.com about a particular style of book.  Whenever I’ve followed similar posts at TalkBass there’s always a book, or a couple of books, that float to the surface as being the best.

Finally if you have a teacher you can simply ask your teacher.  A good teacher should be aware of the majority of the literature that’s out there and be able to recommend the best book(s) or DVD(s) on the particular topic(s) that you’re interested in.

What About YouTube?  There’s A Ton Of Information On There!

Hmm.  YouTube.

Let me first set the record straight and tell you that I’ve got a bunch of videos posted on YouTube.  And now let me give you a warning: Anyone Can Post On YouTube.  So you’ve got some great lessons up there, and some not so great.  Unfortunately the not so great outnumbers the great by a large ratio.

So I’d suggest you use YouTube for the moment as an inspirational tool rather than an educational one.  Find clips of your favourite bassists doing what they do best – and skip over the instructional clips.
Summary

To get the most out of the mountain of tuitional material that’s out there you need to have clear and specific goals of what you’re trying to achieve, and then an effective system of learning educational material that’s in alignment with your goals.

So you no longer have to buy every book or DVD that comes out.  But you only have to buy the books or DVDs that you’ll actually benefit you.  So not only will you end up getting better – but you’ll save yourself a ton of money too.

Footnote:

There’s a book and a DVD that I believe every bass player should have in his library – irrespective of what kind of music they like or want to play.

The book is Standing In The Shadows Of Motown by Dr Licks.  And the DVD is Groove Workshop by Victor Wooten.

Check it out -

Why You Should Take the Time To Master A Single Skill

What do you do every night before you go to bed?  And every day when you wake up.  Some of us even do it in the middle of the day too.  And I even do it on nights when I’ve had a Guiness or two with my friends, or been out on a gig and got in at 4 in the morning and I’m so tired that my vision starts to blur.

We clean our teeth.

Why do we clean our teeth so regularly?

We clean our teeth twice a day, or three times a day, because it’s a habit.  It’s something our parents forced us to do when we were young.  Before we went to bed: ‘Go and clean your teeth.’  In the morning when we woke up: ‘Go and clean your teeth.’

And we’ve done it so regularly that it’s become a habit.

Cleaning teeth?  Playing da bass? What’s the connection?

Well, if we want to get better at the bass we know we’ve got to practice, right?  And if we’re honest with ourselves we know we’ve got to practice regularly too.

And the best way of ensuring that we practice regularly is to make practicing the bass a habit.  So that it doesn’t matter if the thought of practicing leaves us cold, or a friend calls and he’s got tickets to the game, or there’s a great show on TV.

If you’ve truly got the habit you’ll practice irrespective of how you feel about it, you’ll tell your friend that you either can’t go or you’ll have to meet him there later, and for the TV there’s Skyplus (TIVO I think you call it in the US).

So how do you make practicing a habit?

I’d love to tell you there was a guy on the corner of Main Street in the shady part of town who sells 30 minute sachets of ‘habit’ in little plastic baggies.  But instead what you’re going to have to do is a bit of work.

The first thing I want to tell you though is that acquiring a habit is something YOU can do.  You’ve already done it.  You clean your teeth twice (or three) times a day, right? And you’ve got other habits too (wearing a seatbelt when you drive, checking your front door is double locked when you leave the house, turning your cell phone off when you go to bed and/or putting it onto charge, etc etc).

The second thing you need to know is that there is a body of psychological evidence that says you can ‘train yourself’ to acquire a habit in a relatively short period of time (21-30 days).

So knowing that you can acquire a habit, and that you can do it in around 30 days, what you need to do is follow The Habit Plan.

What’s The Habit Plan?

It’s a plan I devised for myself when I started playing the bass again in 2006 after a period of about 6 or 7 years where I barely played the bass at all (I call that period my ‘wilderness’ years).

My original goal was to practice for 90 minutes a day for 5 days a week.  (I know, daily practice is best.  But I’ve got two young kids….they won’t be young for ever, so I don’t practice on the weekend).

I split the Habit Plan into three parts.

Part One was simple.  I made myself a wall chart for the next six weeks (6 weeks x 5 days a week = 30 days).  For each day I practiced 30 minutes I drew a red line leading to the next day.  And my mantra became: Don’t Break The Red Line (by missing a day).

Just so you know the first time I attempted this I failed, partly because I was ill and partly because one of my kids was ill.  But according to the rules I’d defined it was a failure – so I printed another chart and started again.

This time I got to 30 days without Breaking the Red Line.  So it was time for Part 2.  I printed another wall chart – again for six weeks.  This time I had to practice for an hour to draw a ‘red line.’

When I’d completed this – which took THREE attempts, each failed time making me go back to the beginning – I printed the last wall chart.  Again this was for 6 weeks – but for Part 3 of the plan I had to practice for 90 minutes before I would allow myself to draw in the desired ‘red line.’

Part Three was completed on the first attempt.  At the end of which I’d been practicing regularly for around 6 to 7 months and the ‘habit’ of practice had become firmly engrained.
How do I make a Habit Plan for Myself?

The first thing you need is realistically assess how many times you want to practice.  And then assess how much time you want to spend.  Then divide that time by at least 3, so that your first goal becomes something like:

Practice 4 or 5 times a week.  For 20 minutes.

When you’ve successfully completed a red line for 30 days on that, then move onto 40 minutes.  And then onto your desired 60 minutes.  By the time you’ve finished Part 3 you’ll be well on your way to acquiring a really solid habit that will last you a lifetime if you cultivate it.

What happens if I miss a day?

If you miss a day during your Habit Plan and you break the red line, there’s no excuses you have to go back to the start.  Whilst you’re trying to acquire the habit in the first place you have to adopt a zero tolerance policy.

But once you’ve achieved your final goal, and completed a red line that spans at least 30 days, then I’d say that you can cut yourself a little slack.  Sometimes things will come up that you just don’t want to miss – and you’ll have to sacrifice some practice time to do them.

I keep a log of these things – and if I fall below what I consider acceptable then I print out one of my charts and go strict for 30 days .  Just so you know, what I consider unacceptable is if I miss 2 practice sessions in any consecutive15 practice days.

Brush twice, practice once.

The Habit Plan is a relatively easy way to acquire a good practice habit – and maintain it – which will help you in your journey to becoming a better bass player.

Remember that you brush your teeth twice a day – which if you think about it you’ll find is a nearly unbreakable habit.  You can make practicing the bass just as much of a habit.

To truly make use of your new found habit you need a system that maximizes your practice time so that you are constantly improving.  The only system I know that is designed to do this is Deliberate Practice.

His reason?: I had to file a VAT return for my accountant and I don’t feel like training.’

You’d feel cheated right?  Because these are professional athletes.  Training is part of what they get paid vast amounts of money for.  It’s part of their job.  In reality they’d only get out of training if they were injured.  Or ill

What’s this got to do with learning to play the bass?

Well the practice that we do is the equivalent of a professional athlete’s training.  And unless we’re very lucky, no-one’s paying us for the time we’re investing in trying to get better at the bass.

And I’ve talked about in previous articles that the best way to make consistent improvements is by using the principles of Deliberate Practice, and specifically the concept of staying in ‘the learning zone’ so that you’re always working on challenging exercises.

But you know what.  Deliberate Practice is hard work.  And we’re human.  And life happens, whether we like it or not.  Sometimes we have crappy days and don’t feel like practicing.  Last week I had to stay up until 2 AM to schedule accounts for my main business and then email it to my Accountant so he could file my VAT return.  And the next day I felt pretty lousy and didn’t want to practice.

Or you have days when you feel sick.  Or your partner’s sick.  Or your kids or your dog are sick.  And often when you finally carve out some time on those days you just don’t feel like practicing.  You feel like watching a Movie.  Or the latest episode of ’24.’ Or ‘Lost.’  Or reading a book.  Or whatever.  Just not practicing.

So what do you do on a day when you don’t feel like practicing?

There’s 3 approaches you can take.

The first approach is obvious.  You can decide that for today you just don’t feel like it, and you’re going to have a day off, take some down time and come back the next day refreshed and raring to go.

The second approach is also obvious.  You decide that you’re just going to practice anyway.

The third approach is not so obvious.  You decide that you’re going to practice, but that you’re going to practice in The Comfort Zone and not in The Learning Zone.

I thought the whole point of Deliberate Practice was to practice in The Learning Zone.  Why would we practice in The Comfort Zone?

As I’ve said before Deliberate Practice is hard.  There’s only so much of it you can do in a day because it’s mentally tiring due to the intense focus you have to bring to bear on your practice.  And if you’re feeling crappy trying to apply Deliberate Practice to a full session can end up being counter productive and leave you giving up your session early in frustration.

So this is why we turn to the Comfort Zone.  By definition activities in the Comfort Zone are things you can already do relatively easily.  So when this happens to me I simply step back two or three weeks in my virtual Practice Journal (an Excel Spreadsheet if you really want to know) and pick an exercise that’s related to what I SHOULD have been practicing, but one that’s far more comfortable.  And I practice that instead.

Sometimes 10 or 15 minutes of this warms up your brain and you can switch from Comfort Zone activity to Learning Zone activity for the rest of your session.  But sometimes it doesn’t.

The worst case scenario is that I’ve spent my practice session solidifying my understanding of a particular technique or musical application.  You’ve got to be careful though – lots of sessions like this lead – as we’ve seen in previous articles – to stagnation and the mythical ‘plateau.’

But for the odd practice session, remember you’re human and don’t beat yourself up about it.  Life happens.

I can’t even face doing ‘Comfort Zone’ practicing.  I want to give it a miss today…

If you genuinely feel like that then there’s probably no benefit to be gained by forcing yourself to practice.  When this happens to me – which is usually when I’m ill or recovering from illness, or more often when one of my kids is ill – I give myself permission to miss a session.

There’s a but though.

If I miss a session I either make up the time later on in the week OR I listen to something so stimulating that the missed session won’t be repeated the next day.

Actually I’m not telling the truth, I do both.  On the day I miss a practice session I immerse myself in music that’s so utterly inspiring that I find my fingers playing ‘air bass’ AND then I usually add 10 minutes a day to my normal practice schedule until the time has been made up.

So let’s summarize what to do when we don’t feel like practicing (for whatever reason).

We can practice anyway.  We can practice at a lesser intensity.  Or we can listen to music so great that we find ourselves playing ‘air bass.’

Before we get to the fortunate position of being paid to get better there’s two things you need to remember: We’re only human.  Life happens.

If you want to know more about Deliberate Practice, click here.

Mozart was a musical genius right? Most of us know this to be true.  He started composing symphonies at the age of 5.  Take a second and think about that.  Not simple melodies with accompaniment.  But full blown orchestral symphonies.

And bassist Victor Wooten is a similar story.  His eldest brother started teaching him the bass when he was 3 so that he could hold down that role in the family band.  By the time he was 5 he was playing professionally in nightclubs with the family band..

The common feeling is that these guys were blessed with talent when they were born.  And it was sure to come out.

Most people like to believe in the ‘born talented’ concept because it gives them an excuse to fail.

You can hear an echo of this feeling when bass players talk about other bass players:  Wow, that Victor Wooten is so talented.  I wish I was as talented as him.  Or: I love Geddy Lee’s playing, that guy rocks.  I wish I could play like him.

And what they leave unsaid is this unspoken belief: I’m not as good as him because he was lucky and was just born talented.  And if someone truly believes that about themselves they WILL fail.

But there’s some important facts these guys are not aware of, or not thinking about, or vaguely know about but have let slide into their subsconscious.

If you ask piano (and classical music) students which are Mozart’s best (and most played) works you’ll find amongst the answers The Piano Concerto No 9.

This was probably the first work that Mozart did that’s still regarded as a Masterpiece – which was composed when Mozart was 21.

And what’s not generally known or talked about in the ‘Mozart’ story is the role of Mozart’s father Leonard – who was a famous performer and composer in his own right.  Leonard Mozart initiated the younger Mozart into an intensive program of performing and composing.

So by the time he composed the  Piano Concerto Number 9 the younger Mozart had been training for 18 years.

And it’s a similar story with Victor Wooten.

Whilst he was playing professionally from age 8, he didn’t start garnering critical accolades until the late 80s – when he was 25.  By which time he’d been practicing and learning for 20 years.

And he didn’t really explode onto the collective consciousness of bass players until 1993 (when he was 29) – which gave him another 4 years of practice and learning.

So what’s the significance of all this?

The significance is in the thousands of hours training that Mozart and Victor Wooten put in to get where they got to be (and are still going in VW’s case).

There’s a common meme making the rounds at the moment that 10,000 of work is approximately what it takes to be great.  If you break that down that works out at 3 hours a day, every day, for 10 years.

So by the time Mozart composed the Piano Concerto Number 9 he’d had 18 years of hard work.  By the time Victor Wooten became an ‘overnight sensation’ he’d been training for 24 years.

So if you do the maths on practicing even two hours a day you shouldn’t be surprised that Victor Wooten is as good as he is.  Or that Mozart – whose Father was a notorious taskmaster – became great.

And this why when people say something like: I could never get as good as THAT guy, he’s got more talent than me, they’re peddling false wisdom and selling themselves short.

Because the truth is that in every field of endeavour the people who succeed – who are then perceived as being talented – share one  common trait.

Talent equals hard work over time.

But it’s not just hard work over time.  Because there are millions upon millions of people on this planet who go about a daily activity (it’s called a job), and do it year on year and just don’t get any better at what they’re doing.

But if you factor in change to this daily activity you can boost results.  Studies with typists whose speed has been consistent for years have shown that fresh training and incentivising what they are doing leads to sudden improvements in performance (measured in terms of accuracy and speed).

So it’s not just hard work over time.  It’s making sure that the hard work being done is consistently challenging and consistently designed to improve.

And this leads us to why you can’t be Mozart.  Or Victor Wooten.

It’s not that they were born with a unique talent that you just don’t have.

It’s because they were born in a unique environment.  And that unique environment gave them a unique training method that took them from being beginners to being World Class.

Mozart’s training came  from his father.  And Victor’s came from his brothers, and then from his own practicing and learning.  (This is a guy who transcribed EVERY track on the Stanley Clarke ‘School Days’ album when he was 12 or 13.  And from vinyl.  Go and download any track at random from ‘School Days’ on iTunes and you’ll begin to appreciate WHY Victor Wooten is such a bass master.)

And though we can’t be Mozart or Victor we can be ourselves.  And the system that Mozart and Victor used to get to the level of proficiency that they achieved has been uncovered.  And spelt out.  And you can use that system to ensure that your own practice is used effectively to make you better.

The man who uncovered this system of improvement was Dr Anders Ericsson.  He called this system Deliberate Practice.  If you want to get better at the bass guitar the sooner you apply this system to your practicing, the quicker you’ll start seeing constant and continuous progress on a consistent basis.

Remember the adage: “Perfect practice makes perfect?”  Not perfect noodling.  Perfect practice.

Well, I didn’t tell you the whole story.

I wanted to focus attention on the fact that practice can be hard.  And needs to be deliberate.

You need to know what you’re going to practice before you even unsnap the catches on your bass case.

And then you need to go through the exercises that you’ve decided to practice, time them and tick them off.

And noodling gets in the way of that, right?  It’s a distraction, and doesn’t have any beneficial effect on your instrumental skills.

That’s all true, there’s no arguments from me.  Noodling on your instrument will not make you a better player.  Not today. Not tomorrow.  Not next week.  Not ever.  Period.

And yet.

Every day that I practice on the instrument we all love, I noodle.  And not only that, noodling is a pre ordained part of my practice schedule.

If noodling has no benefit, then why do you do it?

It’s true there’s no benefit to a spot of noodling.  But you can deliberately use in as part of your regular practice routine, and not only that but you can use it to make your practice routine work more efficiently.

Now you’re confused right?  First I said: ‘Don’t noodle, it’s not productive.’  Now I’m saying: ‘But actually, you can use noodles efficiently.’  So which is it?

First you have to understand what noodling really is.  It’s when your brain has got no direction.  You’re sat with your instrument, and you know you should be practicing but your brain doesn’t know what to practice, and so it instructs your fingers to play something.

In short, it instructs your fingers to noodle.

So that your hands are doing something whilst your brain is thinking about what comes next.

So here’s my real definition of noodling: it’s something your fingers do whilst awaiting more concrete instructions from your brain.

And knowing what noodling is, now we can slot it into our practice schedule.

Practicing can be mentally tiring.  Intense, focused concentration on a timed series of exercises can be hard work on the brain.

And that’s where noodling comes in.

So the first part of my practice routine goes something like this:

Exercise 1: Sing and play ascending minor 7ths from random root notes – 10 minutes.

Exercise 2:  Sing and play ascending major 7ths from random root notes – 10 minutes

Exercise 3: Sing and play descending minor 7ths from random root notes – 10 minutes

And it goes like that for another 60 minutes.  There’s a lot of concentration and focus involved.  And at the end of an exercise I cross it through so I know it’s done, reset my digital timer and then – right before I start the next exercise – I’ll noodle.

For 10 seconds.

20 maybe.

And then I’m ready to carry on.  So I set the timer going, and carry on with the next exercise.

So noodling is a way for my brain to relax for a short period of time in preparation for another period of intense concentration.

And that’s how noodling can make your practice more efficient – it breaks up dense periods of focused activity and gives the brain a chance to draw breath and then buckle down to the next exercise.

Since I started deliberately doing this I’ve found sitting down to practice far less daunting.

So whilst I wholeheartedly recommend that when you’re practicing you focus 100 per cent on practicing, there’s a short space between exercises where I now make it mandatory to throw in a noodle or too!

And it’s variation: ‘Perfect Practice Makes Perfect.’

I bet you’ve never heard this variation: ‘Noodling makes perfect.”

What is noodling?

Noodling is when your fingers fire off a phrase on your bass.  There’s no conscious thought behind it.

You just play something.  Often a figure or a phrase that your fingers are comfortable playing.

Or a slap lick.  Or something.

Why is noodling bad?

In and of itself noodling is neither good nor bad.  It’s just…noodling.

Where the problem occurs is when a bassist decides: ‘Hey I’m going to practice for an hour now.’

And maybe they warm up with a scale or two.  Throw in some arpeggios.  Maybe some double stops.  And then…

You guessed it.  Some noodling.

When does noodling occur?

Noodling occurs when the brain has nothing to focus on.  There’s no plan, no structure and so after a scale or two the brain throws in something random.

Either a pre-learnt lick.  Or a phrase that conforms to pre-learnt patterns.  Or some random notes strung together.

In short: A noodle.

How to avoid the dreaded noodle?

Avoiding the dreaded noodle is easy.

Every time you go to practice your bass, pull out your practice schedule (if it’s a tangible, physical thing), or load it on your computer if it’s a spreadsheet (or any other kind of computer document), enter today’s date and write down exactly what you are going to practice.

In exact and precise detail.

Write down each exercise.  And how long you are going to practice it for.

Then get your digital timer out, set it running and start on exercise 1.

When you’ve finished exercise 1 make the appropriate notation on your schedule, reset the digital timer and crack on with exercise 2.

Do that until you’ve finished your practice session and you’ll have made good and efficient use of your time.

And you won’t have joined the ranks of bassists who spend 45 minutes noodling every day and claim they practice for an hour.

When you practice you should play through a pre-planned series of exercises and time each exercise.
When you want to goof off just let that your fingers do their own thing and your mind wander…you’ll be noodling in no time! (just don’t kid yourself and say you were practicing).

And you know what?  The bulk of those people just aren’t getting better.  And it’s not for lack of work either, a lot fo these people are putting in time that they could be spending with their families.  Or on their businesses.  Or hanging out with their friends.

Eventually – as they see little return on their investment of time – they get frustrated.  And the hours start to tail off.  And pretty soon they’re not pursuing the goal of getting better anymore.  They just do their ‘thing’ as a hobby.  Or the equipment gets put in its case and shoved in the attic.  Or under the bed.  Or the closet.

And they’ll say: ‘That’s something I used to do.”

And maybe once in a while they’ll think about it.  Or regret that they gave it up.

I know that feeling.  It happened to me too.

I’ve played the bass off and on since I was 15.  I started getting serious in my early to mid twenties.  And then lucked into a gig with a band in a ski resort in France.  And by a combination of lcuk and circumstance that band turned into a business back in the UK – that grew to be one of the UK’s most popular party and wedding bands.
But somewhere along the way – the late 90s to be precise – it happened to me too.

I stopped practicing.

Sure I still played.  And learned songs for gigs.  At this stage I was still gigging two to three nights a week.  Every week of the year.

But almost overnight I went from practicing 4 or 5 hours a day religiously to nothing.

And then as the ‘job’ changed and I became more of a Manager – and my two kids came along –  the number of gigs I played at went down from 8 a month to 2 a month.  And then down to 1 every other month.  And one year – 2005 – I think I did two gigs in the whole year.

Why did you stop practicing?

It was too frustrating.  The returns I was getting on the investment of time were minimal.  I felt I was just treading water.  And I was meeting guys who practiced less than me, who had studied less than me and knew less theory, who were just tearing it up on stage and leaving me behind.

And I succumbed to one of the myths of talent – that everybody’s talent level is pre-ordained and once you hit that limit that’s it.  You won’t get any better.  No matter how hard you try, or how much practice you put in.

And so I stopped trying to improve.  And quietly put my bass in its hard case (which was used so infrequently it was in storage) – and then my bass and its case went into storage.

So what happened?

What happened was this:

My eldest son was coming up to his 5th birthday.  And my wife asked what we should get him for his birthday.  So I said to her: What about getting him a bass guitar?  She thought that was a great idea – she always regretted giving up the piano when she was younger – but on the condition that I teach him.

Which I hadn’t thought through, other than showing him a few licks and tricks.

So I started researching teaching the bass.

I imagined that as with say classical piano, there would be two or three good books that I could use as the basis of his basic teaching.  Allied with the knowledge I had, I thought this would make a good combination.  But the electric bass is only about 50 years old.  And there’s no recognized body of learning like there is with the piano.  Or the classical guitar.  Or even the saxophone (which is only about 50 years older).

So I quickly decided to fashion my own course for him.  One that would be non academic in the sense of passing a written exam, but would equip him with the skills to ‘make it’ in the real world.

In the course of my research I found some gold.

The first piece of gold was the ’10,000’ hours meme which I’m sure you’ve heard of.  ‘It takes 10,000 hours to get really good at something.’

The second piece of gold set light bulbs of in my head.

It was a variation of the 10,000 hours meme.  And the variation said something like: ‘It’s not the 10,000 hours that gets you to be really good, it’s the way you spend those 10,000 hours that determines if you’ll continually improve.’

Suddenly I realized why all those hours I’d sat practicing scales and arpeggios – and all the variations in two octaves, and with different fingerings, etc etc –  had been such a waste of time.   Sure I’d been practicing, but my practice had had little or no focus.  I’d assumed – along with everyone who spends hours at the piano, or with a paintbrush, or playing sport – that the act of simply sitting and practicing would magically make me better.

And that’s another of the myths about talent – that if you want to get better you’ve got to put the hours in.

Surely if you want to get better you’ve got to practice.

That’s absolutely, undeniably true.

If you take up something new for example, and practice it diligently, you will quickly attain a reasonable level of competence at that task.

But progressing beyond that competence level is much harder.  And most people’s method of trying to improve beyond that competence level is simply by practicing more.

And that won’t get you there.

But before you get frustrated and give up – like I and thousands of others have – the final piece of gold I found will help you maintain continuous improvement in your chosen discipline provided you apply it.

Instead of practicing more, you need a system that will focus your practice on MAKING YOU BETTER.  The system is called Deliberate Practice.

Deliberate Practice is for all the people out there putting in serious time at getting better at their chosen discipline.  If you apply it to your practice every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year, and year after year then you will get better.

But what the WeightWatchers Group Meeting has in spades is a factor of accountability.  And when you want to get something done  if you feel that you’re accountable to an individual, or a group of people, it can really help motivate you on those days when you just don’t want to do anything.

And this works for Weight Watchers.  It can also be applied to learning the bass guitar.  Before we look at how we can apply it to the bass, let’s examine exactly what this factor of accountability is, and how it works.

What Is This Factor Of Accountability?

Merriam Webster’s online dictionary tells us that accountability is: “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.”

So if we’re going to make ourselves accountable for a task we have to be willing to both accept responsibility for performing that task AND accounting to someone (or some people) exactly what we have done.

How Does The Factor Of Accountability Work?

The Factor Of Accountability is like a self fulfilling prophecy: you feel accountable to someone (or some people) to perform an action, therefore you do it.  There are areas in your life where it’s already present:

Your job: most of us turn up every day to our place of work.  On or before the time stipulated in our contracts. We’re accountable to our co-workers.  And our bosses.

If you’re part of a sports team – or a band – or any kind of group activity: there will be regular sessions of your team or your band that you’ll be expected to attend.  There will be days you don’t feel like it but you’ll still go – because you feel accountable to your team mates.  Or your band mates.

And that’s how accountability works – because you don’t want to let anyone down (including yourself).

Accountability And Getting Better At The Bass

If you go to one of the top music schools – like Berklee in Boston, or BIT in LA – this accountability is built into the experience.  You have classes that you have to take.  You have assignments that you have to complete.  You have practice that you have to do in order to keep up with both the lessons and the other students.

For most students who take courses at these music schools this ‘need’ to keep up with their lessons and their peers creates a driving momentum that leads them to put in  a ton of practice.  That leads them to stand up and be fully accountable.

But if you’re taking lessons with a private teacher this accountability factor is lessened.  Sure you’ve got to work on the material you cover in each lesson before you can progress onto the next lesson.  But the ‘need’ to keep up is lessened.  If you have a bad week you can always phone or email your Teacher and put the lesson off for a few days.  Or a week.

And that is something that can quickly become a habit.  I’ve had students who want to learn the bass, but they don’t make themselves accountable enough and let things slide if the going gets tough.

Accountability Strategies

Making yourself accountable is a good thing – it is a motivational tool you can use in your busy life to make sure you’re getting things done.  So you need to come up with viable accountability strategies to help you get through those bad days that we all get.

So here are some methods you could use to help generate some accountability in your bass playing lives:

1)    Get A ‘Task’ Buddy.

A task buddy is someone who you email your progress too.  So say you’ve decided that this week yo’ve got the time to slot in five practice sessions then you email your task buddy at the start of the week and let him know that.

Each day that you complete a session you email your task buddy and let him know.  And his or her job is to email back and say: Well done.  Or to email you and say: Hey, you haven’t emailed me today.  What’s going on?

Being a task buddy is an important job – having someone to watch over you can really help when you’re feeling a bit low.  Getting an encouraging word now and then can really help refresh your desire to progress on the bass and put some practice in.

Knowing there’s someone out there who will be disappointed if yo don’t maintain your allotted schedule is a powerful incentive to get your practice in.  But there’s something more powerful than a ‘Task’ Buddy.

2)    Get a Group Of Task Buddies

A group of  task buddies is exactly that – four or five people who are looking over you and encouraging you to keep going.  This is exponentially more powerful than just a single task buddy – it’s like having your own personal bass playing mastermind group.  And often if one of your buddies drops off because of stuff in their life then another one will step up to the plate and take the slack.

The best way in my opinion of working with a group of task buddies is on a private internet forum.  It works like gangbusters.

3)  Email daily updates to your mentor/teacher

This is similar to the first strategy – except there is less feedback.  Recently I had a task to perform – not bass related – which requires regular 30 minute sessions of work.  And I just wasn’t getting it done.  And the guy I was doing it for knew I was busy and asked if I wanted to take a break.

Well, I didn’t want to let him down.  So I said to him: How about I do my 30 minutes first thing every morning and – MOST IMPORTANTLY – email you every day with my recorded progress.

He said: Let’s see how that works.

So we tried it.  And it worked fantastically.  The accountability factor of having to send that email every morning MADE me sit down and do the 30 minutes work, irrespective of whether I wanted to or not.

Helping My Students Out With Accountability

This issue has arisen recently for a couple of students who are part of my Protégé/Online Bases Lesson Classes.

And I’m trying out Strategy 3 with these guys.  At some stage in the near future I would actually like to get a forum going for my students, and see how Strategy 2 works for them.

But the important thing is to put a strategy in place and let the power of accountability help you maintain a healthy daily – or near daily – practice regime.

Summary

1)    We need to practice regularly.  But often life interferes and we go a day – or more – without doing the practice we should.  And our goals of improvement on the bass suffer as a direct consequence.

2)    If we make ourselves accountable to someone – or a group of people – then we don’t want to let them down.  If that accountability is directly related to playing the bass – and it means we practice more – then that’s win-win for us.

3)    Pick an accountability strategy and put it into place.  A healthy practice habit is easier to cultivate once it’s flourishing (HINT: aim to make practicing a habit).  Harness the power of accountability to help create that habit.

Weightwatcher groups work.  Yes there are people who drop out at week one or week two.  But the people who go week after week lose weight on a consistent basis.  Because there’s a really healthy accountability factor built into the experience.  You can put that same accountability factor to work in achieving your bass goals – you just need to be a little creative in how you set it up.

Afterword

True Story #2: This article was written as part of an Article Writing Course I’ve been taken.  Each week my fellow students and I have to complete two articles and post them on a private forum for comments, critique, encouragement etc.  And even though it’s the end of the day and I feel like chilling out and listening to the new Joss Stone album, the power of accountability – specifically not wanting to let my classmates down – made me put that album aside and write this article first.