Day 24.

I've probably left a few things out. Or haven't explained some things enough. After you've finished this booklet why don't you let me know what it is that you might have benefitted more from knowing about or of having had a more detailed explanation?

I guess that I have to mention this: buying a copy of this booklet does not grant you the right to make copies to give to friends or to anyone else for that matter. You've probably heard the reasons a hundred times. However, as part of an experiment I am granting you the right to sell copies, for the price you purchased it for (you must purchase it to resell it), under the honor system agreement that you send me one third of whatever you sell it for. Drop me a note with payment(s) and comments about how I might improve this instruction manual.

P.S. I'm adding one more exercise that might be the most important one in this booklet: I'll call it the Mental Positioning Exercise. It's an exercise that you do entirely in your head. You don't have to touch your bass to do this. But you can do it on your bass if you want to. What's nice about it is that you can put your obsessive mind to good use doing it instead of letting your mind roam freely through its usual wonderland of repetitive thoughts. It's a very simple exercise which tells you: picture your bass strings in your mind's eye and take any note, say the note C or the note Bb or any note you like and imagine what numbered position that note would be in if it was in any scale (or chord) that you could think of. For example the note, C, would be in the first position in the C scale or the C chord. In your mind's eye play on your mental fret board the notes in the C scale and the notes in the C chord (C, E. G). Now do the same thing for the C minor scale and then the C minor chord (C, Eb, G). Now do it for the C major #5 #9 chord. Of course the C note will be in the same 1st position for all of these scales and chords.

Now, take the same note, C, and picture in your mind any other chords and scales, say, to start with, an F chord and F major scale. What position is the C note in within that scale and chord? Answer: the 5th position. Imagine playing them - the C note, the F scale and the notes in the F major chord. Expand your choices of F type chords, for example an F major 7th (F, A, C, E). Try various inversions of some of the notes. In each case picture the fret board in your mind and the notes that you're considering while at the same time emphasizing the position of the single C note. You can get quite good at this and fairly fast. After a while you can do it automatically when you have a spare moment or as a meditative exercise or when you're feeling down or confused and don't want to think at all. You can use it to shut your mind off if you want to. I've speculated that (some) people listen to music to keep themselves from thinking about themselves. A way of preventing self-confrontation. This can be useful at times. A good habit it's not.

Get the idea? Pick any note and any scale, chord or series of scales and chords and figure out in your mind just where that note lies and what its numbered position is. You can make the mental image static, just envisioning all the notes and the single, emphasized note or you can make it more dynamic by imagining the notes or positions changing on the fret board in your mind. This exercise will review and reinforce all the basic structural knowledge that you've learned in this booklet. If you like this mental, pictorial, imaginative exercise (that is, you don't hate it or feel nothing toward it) you can extend it to include other elements of bass playing like fingering techniques or syncopation or actually seeing in your mind's eye the playing of chords with the placement of three or even four fingers on three or four separate notes on three or four separate strings (much as a guitar player would do). In each instance single out one note and examine in your imagination its numbered position in the musical structure that you're imagining.

It's an exciting mental exercise! One that reviews and reinforces all your knowledge up to this point (and into the future), one which will enable you to continue teaching yourself about the mechanics and theories of the bass (with or without further readings of music literature) and one which sharpens your mind in various ways and opens your playing up to discovery, taking the lid off the hidden or the unknown, musically speaking.

End of day 24.