A: It’s easier than it looks. Did you ever hear about the guy who, seeing a piano for the first time, said, “Man! How can you ever mash all those notes at once?”
It’s the same idea. You don’t play them all at once. In fact, we start out just playing three strings just above fret two. If you play guitar or bass, your left hand already knows how to fret these notes, and you don’t need to pick or strum, so you just touch the string to the fret and it plays. Now here’s where you get lucky …
All of your ‘left hand learning’ was really just training your head, and your right hand is wired into the same head. What that means is that whatever your left hand knows, your right hand almost knows already. You’ll discover that your right hand can very quickly be playing like your left hand.
If you’ll start out with our standard ‘BassBottom’ tuning, you’ll notice that the left-hand set of strings are tuned exactly like a standard six-string bass. And the notes on the right-hand set of strings just above fret twelve are *identical* to the left-hand notes just above fret two. This means that you can play both hands identically; in fact you can train them simultaneously.
This method of play is somewhat easier to learn than guitar because the straight fourths tuning makes unnecessary learning additional scales and chords to deal with the ‘B’ string like on guitar. And it’s a little easier than piano because piano requires you to operate your left hand and right hand differently to move up a scale. In this method of play, you operate both hands exactly identically. The BassBottom tuning gives you the only two-handed instrument in the world which lets you play two-handed and operate both hands identically.
Pick up a free preview copy of our method book in the ‘Documents‘ section of this website — or subscribe to our free newsletter and we’ll send you the complete book as a bonus — and you’ll see how surprisingly easy it can be. The book is written so you can try it on any six-to-eight string instrument, and it even works with the unusual ‘Inverted Fifths’ bass-strings tuning.
