After developing a certain proficiency, you are going to perhaps give a bass guitar lesson of your own. A great tool for bass guitar instruction is the use of tablature. There is much you can impart to students by the use of bass guitars tabs.
Many online bass guitar lessons are done with the use of tabs. In fact, there is so much information on bass playing out there that is put into tab form, that a good percentage of tab is done by novices who are getting songs like Blink 182’s ‘Adam’s Song’ bass tabs all wrong.
A rule of thumb is this. If you Google a random tab for a song, for your use or the use of your pupil’s, chances are it would be all wrong. This is why it helps to have a good ear to verify these tabs, or to learn a song yourself and put this into tabs.
1. For bass guitar, it may be insufficient to have just the frets and lines indicating what to play. After all, good technique must be inculcated early on. You could not expect one to play funk bass or something like a Flea bass solo if they didn’t know what to do with their right and left hands.
Slap bass may seem like an intuitive thing, until you hear bad attempts at it. Tabs must at the very least be supplemented by bass guitar videos, say on Youtube, to show how something is to be done right.
2. You should know how to go about writing tabs. Even if you are fairly capable of learning by ear, an inefficient manner of putting things down on paper could lead to a great loss of time.
3. It is advised for you to learn things by the passage. Let us say you are tabbing a song for your student to learn guitar arpeggios. You do not need to play and then pause and then write down the note, and then play-pause-write again.
It is much better to hear how a passage goes and the arrangement of say eight notes in succession, before putting this down either with a pen, or typed out in your computer.
After all, if you have learned sufficient musical theory and are familiar with arpeggio shapes, then you would be familiar with the notes being played and have the proper order of it in your head. This saves so much time, even hours of it.
4. After tabbing out something, it helps to do a ‘spell check.’ Review the entire piece or song, listening to it while reading your tabs. For fast passages, either slow down the tempo or use the pause function.
In reviewing what you did, you may notice some mistakes you have made. Another good thing about reviewing your work is that you are able to comprehend the work as a whole, and even find better and less awkward fingerings and positions for a certain part.
Even when you teach using bass guitar tabs, make sure your student’s horizons are expanded, teaching him listening methods and the proper theory for him to be able to learn tabbing as well.