Maybe you're a fan of Flea of the Chili Peppers, or Sting, or Paul McCartney. Bass can be almost as prestigious as drums, the bass is more important to a bands sound than the drums are. Drums set the tempo, but bass truly sets the groove of the song. It's both rhythmic and melodic.

Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.

It can be played by plucking, slapping, tapping, popping, or by picking the strings with a pick. The bass guitar looks somewhat similar to an electric guitar, but with a larger, heavier body, a longer scale length, and a longer neck. The bass guitar usually has four strings, tuned one octave lower in pitch than the four lower strings of a guitar.

For instance, you've already heard about "slap bass" for sure. Slap is a very common technique and, because of the use in rock situation it has became one of the most popular technique in bass playing nowadays.

The goal is to be able to play all the exercises at 100 beats per minute. When you are able to do that, it will be fairly easy to further increase the tempo. Here is a suggestion for advanced practice: Try to play all the way through all three exercises without stopping in between. When you do this, the last note of the eighth note exercise will become the first note of the triplet exercise.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be harder than it looks. Here's why: The muscles that move your hands and fingers across the neck and strings are rarely used for other tasks. The fine motor skills needed to play a stringed instrument require that the small muscles of the hands be strengthened. So when you take up the bass, you're like a baby learning to walk: Not only do you have no idea of what you're doing, you don't even have the muscles to do it.

Imagine a scarecrow in a corn field - that is how your arm should be bent. With your arm bent in this position it will allow your hand to be in the perfect position to allow your wrist to move freely to strike the strings.

So, now that you have the basic steps on hand position for playing your bass guitar. Now, what you've got to do is learn some other basic stuff, like scales, techniques and song. Be sure that you actually WANT to learn and don't let the frustration discourage you!