( 8 reviews )
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jul 21 2009
I am a good bass player. Primarily rock, but play a little bit of other styles. I bought this just as a tune up, mostly because I had a coupon and couldnt find another use for it. This DVD is excellent. It starts out VERY simple. It may be boring for many at first, it was for me at first, but it gets better quickly. Ed Freidland gives excellent, easily understood instructions. I enjoy his style of instruction. If you start in the beginning, actually do the drills & only move on after you 'master' the section, you will truely gain a lot from this DVD. Even an experienced bass player, like me, enjoyed it. Sure, the early parts were easy & relatively boring, but I breezed through them quickly. You will see that some of these skills & drills are much harder than you think if you force yourself to master them before moving on. Overall, it took me about 3 weeks to work through this DVD this way. Most of which was the last few sections, they are much harder than they seem. I knew how to play "slap bass" prior to this DVD, but using this DVD properly truely made an improvement on my skill. This is 1 item I can truely recomend to anyone who plays bass. I enjoyed it.
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Posted: Jan 11 2009
This DVD is great for learning funk/slap base. I just plug some headphones into my amp, put the DVD in my computer, and I can practice all the base lines without disturbing my roommates. Ed Friedland is a very well spoken and patient teacher. In the excercises he first plays them and then plays them again at half or quarter-speed so you can catch on. I'm having a blast learning some of these techniques. The DVD is very easy to navigate. My only gripe would be that he only plays grooves that are kind of old-sounding funk lines, which is fine, but it would be nice if he strayed a little from the formulaic stuff. It's realy not much of a gripe though. Love the DVD.
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Posted: Jul 23 2008
If all instruction material was as solid as this, I would have 50-100 books/DVDs in all (for bass, guitar, mandolin), not a 1000 or more. There is enough easily usable information here to build your technique from scratch to as serviceable as any normal contemporary bass player's slap technique needs to be in typical playing situations. Only if you play in a solo or a bass-dominant musical context, would you need anything more. Of course, once you fall in love with the possibilities of playing slap & pop (and tap etc.), you WILL need more. At that point you should get Stuart Clayton's ULTIMATE SLAP BASS, which actually is as complete a guide on any style on any instrument ever written (I otter know, coz I've invested more money in instruction material than any other human). Still, Clayton's book might be overwhelming because of its thoroughness; Ed's DVD has the essentials and intermediate stuff, but there's a load of them in here and the booklet is generous by DVD standards. The only 3rd slap instruction you will perhaps need is the Hal Leonard book FUNK BASS by Chris Kringel as that gives you some real famous songs to learn. Of course, you can later progress to Victor Wooten's and Primus's transcriptions. In any case, for less than 20 buckaroos, this DVD provides the maximum wham for the whampum! Not considered: Double thumbing, chord playing, and strumming. Of course, no tapping either; although in performance at a high level, tapping is often interspersed into slap technique.
