So I've been playing bass seriously for about 5 years now, but on and off for about 10 years total. Now, I'm sharing my knowledge and teaching someone how to play bass. The thing is, I don't know much about teaching bass, unlike the guitar.

Previously, she played the acoustic guitar for about 6 months and learned basic picking, some chords, etc, and has impeccable timing. That being said, I think she has lots of potential to be a really good player. Now she's interested in playing bass, and even wants to get good enough to play bass for my band. While I don't think it's impossible to get her really good within about 6 months (if she practices a lot), I do think it will be difficult challenge. To make things even harder, I want to start playing shows by the end of the year (that's less than 6 months for those of you who can't count).

PsychoBliss material isn't exactly to the standards of technical black metal (even in the most challenging sections of the songs), but it is a little bit of a handful at times. Are there any useful exercises or techniques that you have found that exponentially increased your technical ability in a short amount of time?

The only thing that will get her up to level is investing hours and more hours of practice.

There are probably many exercises out there, but if she has some basic technique down, also start off with easy metal songs and build up to harder ones.
It will accustom her to linking riffs and learning structures as well.

Anyone that can play guitar can play pickstyle bass. Just have her start practicing your songs, if she can't play full speed than have the bass go half-time.

The best exercise to be able to play the hard parts of your songs is... the hard parts of your songs, real slow with a metronome.

That's very true, we'll see if she has the dedication...



Funny that you say that, because I actually did that last night and I think it will work out pretty well. I thought back to when I made my greatest improvements, and it was when I played with a guitarist that made me play stuff I could barely play...lol

Gave her a moderately difficult riff to learn and now she's playing at least 45 minutes everyday. lol

I can share a general tip.

Practicing very elementary, basic stuff, something like the following tab. For starters, have her try how fast she can play it cleanly, and get the tempo using a metronome and memorise it. Then have her set the metronome to about 20bpm less than what it was. After 15-30 minutes of doing it over and over (incredibly tedious, yes), have her try it at max speed again. The increase in bpm should be tangible.
On any string: 2 4 5 2 4 5 7 4 | 5 7 9 5 7 9 10 7 | 9 10 12 9 7 9 10 7 | 5 7 9 5 4 5 7 4
Practice on each string.

This one is also a very helpful excercise:
G-----------------------
D------1-3-4-3-4-3-1---
A----1---------------1--
E-2-4 -----------------2

When it's going alright, move up on the fretboard in respect to the scale:

G-------------------------
D-------3-4-6-4-6-4-3----
A-------------------------
E-4-6-7----------------7-4

And so forth.