Get Better Ears: Ear Training for Bass Players

This is an intermediate course for bass players who already have some experience. This is the method that most NYC musicians use to learn their repertoire—take it from an experienced bass player who knows over 1,000 songs! Rather than learning from a real or fake book and forgetting everything, this method ensures that you will MEMORIZE each tune that you learn. Through singing, understanding melody-bass relationships, and identifying intervals and chords through emotions, you will be learning and memorizing tunes with ease in this method. The Big Ears method starts by identifying the chords to each song from the melody. Instead of trying to predict what the chords are, this method simply looks at the melody as a way of revealing each chord. By honing in on the melody while listening to the recording, you will discover what each chord is—and you will thoroughly learn the tune, as opposed to just reading from a lead sheet.

One challenge we all face with learning tunes is memorization. We often wonder why it is so hard to memorize the tunes that we’re learning, when we can read it from a book with relative ease. The answer is simple: melody-bass relationships. By singing the melody and playing the root in the Big Ears method, you’ll be able to learn and memorize tunes with no problem!   

• Why learning tunes is important
• How memorizing tunes is different from reading tunes
• The most effective methods for learning tunes
• How professional players can learn 1,000+ tunes
• And more!