UnitBasse

Tips · Routine

A bass practice routine
in 20 minutes a day

A little, but every day, and always in the same order: warm-up, technique, scales, rhythm, then playing for fun. A well-built 20-minute session beats an hour of random noodling.

The idea: consistency beats length

Your fingers and your memory learn through repetition, and they forget between sessions. Twenty minutes every day gets you further than two hours on Sunday: each day you pick up where you left off the day before, before you’ve forgotten it.

A fixed order helps too: you don’t have to decide what to do, you just start.

The 20-minute session

A bar split into five parts of 3, 4, 4, 4 and 5 minutes.
Twenty minutes, in five parts.
  1. 3 min of warm-up.
  2. 4 min of technique.
  3. 4 min of scales and arpeggios.
  4. 4 min of rhythm.
  5. 5 min of playing.
TimeWhatHow
3 minWarm-upYour hands without the bass, then the 1-2-3-4 exercise, slowly.
4 minTechniqueOne exercise at a time, with a metronome: alternating fingers, string crossings, muting.
4 minScales and arpeggiosA scale or an arpeggio in a new key, following the circle of fifths.
4 minRhythmA single note, over varied figures: quarter notes, eighth notes, rests, short and long notes.
5 minPlayWith a drummer, a band or a song. For fun, and to put it all into practice.

Variations

  • 10 minutes, on busy days: two minutes per part.
  • 45 minutes, on free days: the same order, each part longer. Take a break halfway.

Write down your tempos

Keep a notebook, on paper or on your phone. For each exercise: the tempo you reached without mistakes, and the date. Go up 5 BPM only once it feels easy. When you read back through your notebook, you see your progress, even in the weeks when you feel stuck.

One topic a week

Rather than skimming everything, pick a theme for the week: arpeggios, playing with a pick, short notes, a new scale. It fills the technique and scales parts. The next week, pick another.

The days you don’t feel like it

Five minutes anyway. Tune up, play a scale, play a song you love. What matters is not breaking the chain: the urge to play often comes back after a few minutes.

With UnitBasse

Every part of the session has its tool in the same window. The Tuner to start. The Metronome for technique and rhythm, from 30 to 300 BPM, with its −5 and +5 buttons to go up step by step. BackTrack to play with a band, in 16 styles and 131 chord progressions. And Scores to write your own exercises and keep them in your notebook.

For scales and arpeggios, the Scales tab is the most complete. It shows the scale of the day across the whole fretboard, and Play lets you hear it. The Harmony block adds the chords in the key and their arpeggios, and the Circle of Fifths picks tomorrow’s key.

The Scales tab in UnitBasse: the G natural minor scale across the whole fretboard, from fret 0 to fret 20, with its formula and its notes above.
The scale of the day across the whole fretboard: here, G natural minor.
The Harmony block in the Scales tab, set to Arpeggios: the seven arpeggios in the key of G minor, from Gm7 to F7, and the fretboard showing the selected arpeggio, Gm7.
The arpeggios in the key, one per degree, and where they sit on the fretboard.
The Circle of Fifths in the Scales tab, set to G minor: the circle of keys, with the key signature, the relative key, the fifth and fourth above, and the chords in the key.
The Circle of Fifths, to move on to the next key.
The BackTrack tab in UnitBasse: a swing jazz progression, the fretboard showing the degrees of the current chord, and the sound settings for each instrument.
BackTrack, for the last part of the session: playing with a band.

Frequently asked questions

How long should I practice bass each day?

Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is enough to make progress, as long as you do it every day and in a fixed order. On free days, make each part longer rather than adding new ones.

What should I practice first?

After the warm-up, technique: that’s when your focus is at its best. Save playing with a band or a song for the end, as a reward.

How do I know if I’m making progress?

For each exercise, write down the tempo you reached without mistakes, with the date. Read back through your notebook every month: the numbers show the progress you don’t feel from day to day.