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Playing the guitar is one standard pastime nowadays. For a good deal of people, it is likewise a way of expressing themselves and elevates the sparetime activity into an art form or sometimes, science.
Playing the guitar, however, is no joke. It requires a lot of forbearance and practice. For some people, they would rather study playing the bass guitar than the regular guitar. Here are some tips on learning to play the bass guitar.
1. Feel the beat
Playing the bass guitar is different principally from playing a regular guitar because it entails an special and significant stress on the beat of the music. One may compare the bass guitar into a drum or percussion set that is made into a guitar. Beats are very important in playing bass guitar because this type of guitar gives depth and timing to any song.
If one understands the notes of a regular guitar through his ears, a bass player grabs the notes of a bass guitar through his chest. The bass guitar pounds on the heart and gives it sensations through the depth of the music.
2. Learn the notes (single chords) on a regular guitar
The main thing when it comes to bass guitars is that they are tuned like popular guitars. The divergence is that most regular bass guitars only have four strings which are far thicker than general ones. This kind of strings allows the bass guitar to go very deep in terms of tone.
Take a regular guitar (which is tuned from the thickest to the lowest string- E – A – D – G – B – E) and exclude the two thinnest strings at the bottom and what is left is fundamentally a bass guitar with thinner strings.
Bass playing is normally note-oriented and not chord-oriented. This means that single notes are hit more often in bass playing and this system is the necessary element of bass playing. One ought to be intimate with the tunings and the notes in a regular guitar to be capable to the right way play the bass guitar.
3. Finger placing is important
Hitting the bass guitar fret board with the left-hand fingers is very important since it is a major factor that will determine the wholeness of each note. Try to place the fingers such that they are close to the fret on the right. The right hand ought to also be practiced so as to give bass guitar playing a holistic approach.
4. Strengthen your grip
Another essential thing to formulate in bass playing is the strength of both hand’s fingers. The bass guitar is a sturdy and solid musical instrument, strength is necessitated to play it.
In playing the bass guitar, one must always take one lesson at a time. Bass playing requires repetition and there’s no sense in hurrying the learning process. One will have to feel the notes through his soul and through his heart and become one with the bass guitar.
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She was the basi “great rock diva”, the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane who stood at the forefront of the sixties and seventies counterculture and belted out classics like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”. Now, in her own inimitable voice, Grace Slick offers a revealing self-portrait of the complex woman behind the rock-outlaw image, and delivers a behind-the-scenes, no-holds-barred view of rock’s grandest stages. Wildly funny, candid, and evocative, SOMEBODY TO LOVE? tells what it was in truth like during, and after, the Summer of Love — and how one remarkable woman pulled through it all.
ReviewGrace Slick looks back on a lifetime of sex, drugs and rock & roll in Somebody to Love?, a wisecracking essay featuring cameos by a good deal of mighty famous faces. As the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship and, still later, Starship), Slick had a ringside seat for a good deal of of the decade’s most illfamed high jinks–Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, the sexual revolution, and of course, ’60s drug culture. Put it this way: if the dormouse said feed your head, Slick did–again and again and again. Which leads to this memoir’s necessary shortcoming: it’s hard to document the most crucial decade of your life if you can’t do not forget it. Still, even if she’s a little fuzzy on a lot of of the details, the anecdotes alone are worth the price of admission, from the time Slick and Abbie Hoffman plotted to dose Richard Nixon to her surreal sexual encounter with a almost autistic-seeming Jim Morrison: “Although I knew there was numerous pattern of events going on in his head that connected what I’d just said to what he was thinking, it never made sense.” Now sober and nearing her 60s, Slick frets over her aging body, campaigns versus biomedical research, and feeds the raccoons in her back yard. But she hasn’t lost any of her widely known and esteemed feistiness. This is the same woman who flashed her breasts at photographers, pulled her skirt over her head at concerts, and even once, “having ingested the entire contents of the minibar in my hotel room,” stuck her fingers up an audience member’s nose. Grace Slick may have mellowed, but bless her heart, she’s still running off her mouth. –Mary Park
From Publishers WeeklyRock chanteuse Grace Slick was a sophomore at the University of Miami when, in 1958, a friend from her Bay-area hometown sent her an article with regards to the new San Francisco scene?a world of “marijuana, rock music and strange but enjoyably artistic beatnik behavior.” Intrigued, Slick returned home and threw herself into a counterculture that was distinctly at odds with her post-war middle-class upbringing. After playing in a general local band for a few years, she joined the front ranks of ’60s rock icons when she was invited to sing for the already-prominent band Jefferson Airplane, recording hits like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” that helped to define the kaleidoscopic rock world of the 1960s. Here, Slick unabashedly details her long flirtation with psychedelic drugs; her dalliances with Jim Morrison (“like making love to a drifting art form with eyes”) and lesser rock luminaries; her a great deal of run-ins with the law; and her experiences of marriage and motherhood as her band evolved from rebellious trailblazers into the florid mainstream radio acts Jefferson Starship and Starship. Her present-day dedication to animal-rights causes, visual art and spirituality are likewise recounted. There are few revelations here, and Slick’s penchant for elliptical, hippie-ish pronouncements (“Life, the constantly mutating funeral party”) won’t win her a heap of new fans. But the appealingly wry good humor she brings to her own life story makes this an engaging trip through two turbulent decades of rock ‘n’ roll. Photos. Editor, Rich Horgan; agent, Maureen Regan. Audio rights to Warner.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalAs lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick fired the imaginations of a generation. In this frank, often times crazy memoir, she does not disappoint those who do not forget her direct, off-the-wall wisecracking. She provides a highly agreeably diverting insider’s report of galore of the psychedelic era’s major events, including Woodstock and Altamont, seen through the proverbial haze of sex, drugs, and rock’n'roll, as well as her liaisons with Jim Morrison and respective members of her band. Eventually, the years of extravagant living and self-abuse started out to take their toll. After three DUI arrests and periods of drug rehabilitation, she now lives in Malibu and is active in animal rights causes. The era of free love has never been better chronicled. Slick’s appealingly blunt and amusive narrative nicely complements Barbara Rowes’s Grace Slick: The Biography (LJ 2/15/80). Recommended for public libraries and all music/pop culture collections.
-?Richard Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful client reviews
23 of 25 humans found the following review helpful.
 Disappointed in the surface treatment of events
By Eric S.
I read the book in two days and while it contained a few items of interest, I was disappointed in the lack of detail in numerous areas. I would have been genuinely mesmerized to listen Grace Slick talk with regards to the Haight Ashbury days, how the Airplane dealt with the record company business, or the sessions and live appearances that led to galore of their outstanding songs. One would think that a woman whose songs were inspired by the likes of Lewis Carroll and James Joyce would have a deeper perspective than this book shows, but perchance not. I think a lot of the blame has to go to Andrea Cagan who most likely told her to make sure to tell her sexual experiences with widely known and esteemed rock stars if not one thing else. In any case the editing ought to have been a lot better; the book is kind of a rambling mess. But for fans of Grace and the Airplane and ’60s rock music in general, it’s still an interesting read for all it is faults.
22 of 24 persons found the following review helpful.
 Somebody to like a lot in any case!
By Gregor von Kallahann
Grace Slick was always one of the more quotable rock stars. Even well past the point where Rolling Stone would even consider giving one of her records (solo or with Jefferson Whatever…) anything remotely like a positive review, they’d still run little blurbs on her from time to time, normally with one or two “outrageous” quotes.
She could be counted on for that. Funny, sarcastic, but also endearingly self-deprecating, her take on the world in standard and the absurdities of rock stardom in queer were always worth a look. Once when asked with regards to all the attention she received as the sole female fellow member of a six-”man” band, she pooh-poohed it all by saying, “Well, if you had five cows and a pig, you’d look at the pig, right?” Well, yeah, altho Grace was hardly a pig, and I don’t know with regards to how her bandmates may have felt in regards to being called cows, but you get the idea.
Often described by humans as an “ice queen”–at least by persons who had never heard of Nico–Grace was actually finelooking down to world and anything but self-serious. On the other hand, her penchant for wisecracking and sheer outrageousness many times detracted from her more reflective, artsy side. Her own compositions, with their ofttimes elliptical lyrics and exotic arrangements, hinted at an artistic ambition that was very real–if never entirely realized. Still “rejoyce,” “Two Heads” and “Hyperdrive” stay real dazzlers, proposing that if Grace had been less given to epataying the old bourgeoisie (and ribbing the counter-culture too, much to her credit) she might have pulled off something even more remarkable than what she (with and without her respective bands) in truth did achieve.
The book is, for the most part, a fun breezy read, the funny, quotable, outrageous Grace. No, it’s not all it might have been, but it was gorgeous much what I expected. This is one of those odd books, where you suspect that the narrator’s apparent “frankness” in truth serves as a kind of defense. Don’t let’s dig too deep, God forbid. One may read amongst the lines a bit, particularly in the brief early chapters that describe her childhood and adolescence, and possibly conclude that there are a good deal of conflicts there above and beyond what she’s more than willing to reveal. And well, that’s OK. Really, most of us are not THAT nosey. But the tone is an odd juxtaposition of self-disclosure and self-protectiveness. “Odd”–but not actually all that surprising. Honesty–or as we said in the 60s, “righteousness”–was a counter-cultural value, but you couldn’t get too “corny” regarding the whole thing either.
I could have done without another re-hashing of the “plot to dose Nixon” co-starring Abbie Hoffman. Despite Grace’s protestations to the contrary, I don’t believe she ever intended to get any further than the White House gate–you don’t fetch Hoffman as your escort if you in truth want to get in and wreak a little psychedelic mayhem on the President of the United States. It’s a wild tale, but it was more theater and self-mythologizing than anything else.
Nor do I peculiarly care in regards to the Jim Morrison episode (the strawberry jam session). It seemed like a gorgeous meaningless encounter for both participants, but somebody (co-writer Andrea Cagan, perhaps?) ought to have thought it merited a chapter of it is own. It’s disappointing that this kind of tale-telling is given more focus than on the music itself. In one revealing passage, Slick talks when it comes to her obligation to be as well rehearsed as possible. That kind of professionalism may seem antithetical to “hippie” ideals of spontaneity and improvisation. But that was one of the little contradictions that made Slick a compelling figure to start out with. Too bad that same level of care didn’t in truth make it into the autobiography.
Now that it’s available as a paperback (or as a remaindered cloth-bound edition), the book is well worth picking up–for curiousity seekers as well as fans. Enough of the quotable Grace is there. The mysterioso, orphic Grace is missing in action though. Too bad in a way.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
 Tough to be a Rebel in a Mundane World
By ! Metamorpho 
I have loved Grace Slick for such a long time that when this essay basi came out, I without delay purchased it and read it with much glee. It is just what I expected from her and I am not disappointed at all. In fact, I am a little surprised, but not actually shocked, that galore did not give it better ratings. I wanted to learn more regarding Grace and her viewpoints and she was more than generous with her humour, wit and outlook. Honest too. What I love with regards to Grace is the way she followed her own outlook on things. She side-stepped being specified by others and actually didn’t care too much regarding what others thought of her. In this…. she will have my love and wonderment forever. True…… she didn’t go deep into the personalities of the 60′s icons much. She didn’t give much clear or deep perception into her songs and what they meant. What unfeigned artisan does? But, she IS a hoot – and I purchased the book because she is such a character. In fact….. I was so enamoured with this book that I wrote her publisher to say how much I enjoyed it. A few months later, I received an 8X10 signed shiny in the mail from her – postage due of course. I laughed. “That’s my Grace” I thought.
If you people out there may put your egos and expected values on the shelf and read this expose from a unfeigned 60′s San Francisco survivor, I think you will find a heap of things to like. Leave your morality, your preconceived notions and your judgemental placards at the door. After all, this is Grace’s world – not yours. And, thank-you Grace for all those great tunes. I still listen. And thanks for just being yourself.
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