| Bass Hanon| how-to-play-bass.com
INTRODUCTION
I first started playing the bass when I was a 15 year old kid. Back in the
day there was no Midi, no Tab, no playalongs, no books of
transcrip-tions, no bass magazines, no bass sites on the Internet.
You were pretty much stuck with what you could work out on your own
or what a teacher could show/tell you. (Note: trying to learn from
re-cords - you know, those 12 inch circles of black plastic - was a really
in-teresting experience too - I developed great ‘needle lifting’ expertise! And
ruined a load of vinyl in the process).
The situation for bassists is totally different now; we’ve got the internet,
we’ve got tab sites, books of transcriptions, YouTube lessons, DVDs,
web-sites. All sorts.
In fact I think we’ve almost got too much information.
Now we all know that to get better we’ve got to practice. But if you’re
anything like me, life is busy (a wife, two kids, three bands to manage,
blah blah blah) and I have limited time to learn new songs, keep my
technique in shape etc etc.
So I like to find practice materials that do double duty - ie you can work
on two - or more - things at the same time.
What if I told you that I found a series of exercises -nearly 200 years old
– that worked for me, and that if you do them for 20 minutes or so a day
you will dramatically improve the following:
• Left hand finger strength and independence
• Right hand finger alternations and string skippings
• Left and right hand co-ordination
• Ear Training
• Fretboard familiarity in all 12 keys (from the lowest note on
your bass to the highest – however many strings you have)
• Oh, and these exercises are perfect warm up material for your
hands too.
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cises been hiding?
The answer is: they’ve been hiding all along, in plain sight. And they’ve
been pretty much overlooked by the bass playing community because
they are piano exercises.
They’re called Hanons – after their creator, Charles Louis Hanon, a
French composer born in 1819 – and they were specifically designed to
help pianists develop a more virtuosic technique.
The Hanons make great exercises when applied to the bass – you get to
improve your finger dexterity, hand co-ordination, fretboard knowledge
and musicality - all whilst doing 10 minutes of warming up every day.
I’m so glad you bought the Bass Hanon Pack. If you apply it for 10
min-utes or so every day, your investment will soon pay off – these exercises
will give you increased facility and increased confidence too, both in
your playing and your ‘hearing.’
And that greater confidence and facility will show up in your playing
– and others will notice it as well, trust me.
So thank you once again.
Warm regards from the UK
Paul Wolfe
www.how -to-play-bass.com
PS I’d also strongly recommend that you sign up for my free weekly ezine
– if you’re not already a member. Head over to my website, you’ll find
the sign up link on the right hand side of every page. The ezine features
a lesson/tutorial with a new bassline each week - with both notation and
tab - plus loads of other bass related cool stuff.
| Bass Hanon| how-to-play-bass.com
THE BASS HANONS
So what are bass hanons?
The Bass Hanons are based on a series of piano exercises – which the classical pi-ano fraternity refer to as Hpi-anons, after the composer who designed them. I heard one of them being played whilst dropping off Christmas presents to a friend of my mother-in-law’s in December 2006.
That was a happy coincidence, coming at a time when I was looking for more in-teresting warm up material. I asked what exercise was being played and my eyes popped out when my hosts presented me with a whole book of exercises (they popped out again when I found out that book was just Volume 1 – and that there were two more volumes).
Within days I’d got a copy – it would have been sooner but there are not many mu-sic shops in the Cotswald’s part of England that stay open on Christmas Day! – and I started using these exercises on bass almost immediately.
So what exactly is a bass hanon?
Well – and I’ve adapted the piano exercises slightly – a Bass Hanon is a sequence of 8 notes that is applied sequentially to each note of a major scale. And the pattern is inverted when you descend.
The original piano exercises were sequenced over two octaves (and usually went a fifth above) so unless you’re playing an extended range bass you’ll have to make do with one octave versions.
If you wanna take one for a test drive, skip ahead to Hanon No 1 in C, plug your bass in and play through it to get a flavour of what these exercises are about.
How can using the bass hanons help me as a bass player?
Well as I said in the introduction to this book, if you play them slowly for 10 min-utes or so they make a fantastic warm up exercise.
As well as warming up both of your hands, regular use of the Bass Hanons will help with:
• Left and finger strength and independence
• Right hand finger alternations and string skippings • Left and right hand co-ordination
• Ear training
| Bass Hanon| how-to-play-bass.com
I can see how these exercises help with the fingers, how do they help with ear train-ing?
Well if you use the midi files that I’ve provided, you can play the Hanons whilst hearing the sound of a chord ‘drone.’ This will give you a harmonic reference point so you’ll actually start to relate notes to the sound of a chord.
Using Midi is something that all practicing musicians should be able to do, it’s such a powerful tool. Whether you use PC or a Mac you should get hold of a cheap, midi sequencing program and learn how to use it so that you can splice the midi files to-gether and play a Hanon exercise in all 12 keys with chordal accompaniment (See also the chord progressions section at the back of the book for recommendations on how to order the 12 keys when playing through a Hanon – so not only do you relate the sound of the Hanon against a chord drone, but you also start to practice hearing chords moving in different sequences! Powerful stuff for a simple warm up exercise).
What about using the Hanons to work on my ‘chops?’
You can – and I’m sure a lot of bassists who buy this ebook will. But that’s not the reason I published this book. These exercises are the best warm up exercises I’ve ever encountered, and I like to try and make every bit of practice do double duty if possible – and these exercises work on sooooooo many things simultaneously it makes them a no-brainer in my eyes.
Yeah, but I could really hone my chops, man.
You need a sound technique to express your musical ideas, that’s a given. But you can get a sound technique with a surprisingly minimal amount of work. What I’ve found in teaching is that bassists who ‘work on their chops’ might become bassists who can play something fast, but it rarely makes them a better musician.
If you want proof, go into a music store and hear the guys trying out basses and beating them up with their super-cool, super-fast slap and tap licks. Watch some-one for a minute, the go up and say: ‘That’s a really cool lick man, I really like it. It would work really great for a song my band is playing. That tune is a fusiony kind of thing in a weird key though, C#m7b5 – any chance you could show me the lick in that key?’
Over 95% of the guys with ‘music store’ chops won’t even know what a C#m7b5 chord is let alone be able to change their lick to fit that chord.
| Bass Hanon| how-to-play-bass.com
Uhh…can I use any of the patterns as bass lines? Or solo lines?
You could.
But they’re just warm up exercises (that come with a collection of great side bene-fits too), my honest recommendation is spend 10-12 minutes a day with them, and then go play some other stuff.
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HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Firstly I gotta stress something: the Bass Hanons are not music per se, they’re exercises. And they’re bloody good exercises. They help with good left hand
technique, finger strength and dexterity, etc etc – we’ve gone into that already. And they’re so bloody good at doing at all those things that I’d love to say that I invented them.
But there are bass players out there who will use these exercises to ‘build their chops.’ They’ll use the Hanons and beat up on their metronomes and drum machines so they’re playing Hanon 7 in 16th notes at 150 BPMs, or something like
that. And they’ll play them for hours and hours. My advice is simple:
Don’t.
If you want to get ahead in the bass playing game don’t work on playing fast for speed’s sake. Work on hearing fast and being able to play what you hear. Being able to play something musical on a tune, that fits the style, and – most importantly - grooves will, in 99.9% of situations, be a better fit than being able to play something fast.
A lot of kids think fast is better. It isn’t. Fast is simply…faster.
(Now don’t get me wrong, I love to see the Billy Sheehans, Victor Wootens and Brian Brombergs of the world tearing up the fretboard as much as the next guy…but they’re not just playing fast, they’re also expressing musical ideas.)
So use these Bass Hanons for say 20 minutes a day. For that they are as close to perfect as you can get, they warm your hands up, and there’s a truckload of secondary benefits thrown in too.
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LEARNING A HANON
So let’s start at the beginning.
You’ve got your practice schedule mapped out for this week – – and you’ve made the wise choice of using the Bass Hanons as your warm up material.
IMPORTANT NOTE: All the bassists who buy this ebook will be at different ability
levels – if you don’t make it through all the steps it’s no big deal. Just do your 20 minutes or so, put the Hanons away and crack on with the rest of your practice schedule.
Here’s the steps you need to go through to learn a Hanon. 1) Pick the Hanon you’re going to be working on.
2) Have a quick read through the intro sheet to each Hanon.
3) Decide whether you’re going to play the Hanon ‘positionally’ or ‘modally’ (for more advanced players)
4) Play slowly through the example I’ve tabbed out – remembering that there are alternative ways to play the Hanons than the ones I show.
5) Repeat the Hanon several times to get the sound of the Hanon in your head, and the feel of the fingerings in your hand. Play along with the midi file to make sure you’re playing it accurately (any wrong notes should really jar as they’re usually a semitone out!).
6) Choose a Key Sequence from the Chord Progressions section at the back of the book.
7) Begin playing through the Hanon in all 12 keys. 8) Stop.
9) Whenever 20 minutes or so is up (use a timer if you need to) put the Hanons away until tomorrow and get on with the rest of your practice.
If you’re reasonably new to the bass guitar, it might take the best part of a week to get through a Hanon in all 12 keys – that’s no big deal. It’s not a race. What I suggest is that at the end of a week you move onto a new Hanon – even if you’ve not completed all of the above steps.
Sooner than you think you’ll be completing a Hanon within a week, then it won’t be too long until you can do two Hanons in a week, etc etc. All the time you’re doing it, you’ll be improving your facility, your fingerboard knowledge and you’ll start playing with greater confidence.
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Seriously. Trust me. It works.
The important part of the process is to play the exercises slowly before you start playing with a metronome, or the midi files. If there are any sub sections that give you particular problems, just work on that bar – or couple of bars – until you’ve got it nailed. Do it slowly – but thoroughly – and you’ll find you will get through it. If you find you’re having trouble working through a Hanon the way I’ve tabbed it out, and then applying it to other keys, that’s no problem either. I’ve provided all 20 Hanons in every key with a blank tab staff, so if at the start you need to write in
every fret location then go ahead and do it.
No-one’s going to know but you.
So get your bass out, turn a couple of pages, and give the Hanons a good workout! If you’ve got any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to drop me an email: paul@how-to-play-bass.com
