Dad's Blog

July 11, 2006

TUE 11 JUL 2006

Book: Simplified Sight-Reading for Bass By Robert

Simplified Sight-Reading for Bass (by Josquin des Pres)

I have played guitar forever, but I took up the bass about a year ago. I joined a church band and we are playing lots of sheet music out of the hymnal and bass clef was a mystery to me. I picked up this book for a crash course to get proficient enough to sight the church hymns.

The book is 69 pages long and is a sequence of progressively more difficult exersizes all written out on the staff. It comes with a CD that's helpful, but you won't be loading it on your iPod since its pretty dry stuff.  The author appears to have a leaning toward Carvin basses because there is a photo of three of them on the cover.

The first half of the book is dedicated to rythm and meter which is usually a good thing, but that wasn't a good fit for me. I already had a pretty good feel from reading guitar and church hymns aren't exactly syncopated. So I didn't like so much time spent there but most bass players would benefit from it.

The second half of the book is about pitch. It gets you started by teaching a string at a time. So all the notes in the first few exersizes are on the 'E' string. The next exersizes are on the 'E' and 'A' strings. It builds up until you're using all four strings. It then does a good job of introducing intervals and accidentals.

The book covers key signatures too tersely and fails to introduce an effective method for handling them. It never discusses the circle of fifths or fouths and never talks about modes. Their method relys on memorizing every scale in every key...youch! Harmony and theory is beyond the scope of the book.

This book promises to get you sight reading at a rudimentary level quickly and it delivers on that promise.