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.

Whatever your reasons, you want to learn how to play bass. You don't have to go to music school to do this. You can take online bass guitar lessons. You don't even need a bass guitar to start out with. Any acoustic guitar will do, since the top four strings of any guitar are the four strings of a bass guitar. What you learn on an acoustic guitar you can then transfer to bass.

The standard tuning of a four string bass guitar from highest (thinnest string) to lowest (fattest string) is G-D-A-E. On a five string bass the tunings are similar with the addition of a low B string. On a six string bass guitar, a thinner (higher pitched) string is added, and is tuned to C, In other words on a 6 string bass guitar the settings are B-E-A-D-G-C, where B is the fattest string or lowest note and C the highest and thinnest.

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.

In struggling simply to get out the notes, though, it's easy to neglect developing these small muscles. The result can be a great deal of wasted energy and motion, limiting one's technique. So here are some of the do's and don't's of hand position (the advice here is for righties; if you're left-handed, adjust accordingly):

Also, crucial to slap bass is the "snapping" sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard - this is called "popping". Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics - but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.

Learning your bass patterns from alternate views of music theory and fretboard theory will result in a large impact on your bass playing skill, which is what being a great bass player is all about. For example traditional patterns, modern patterns, in position and out of position patterns need to be an integral part of your bass lessons.