One Octave Major Scales for Double Bass

A few years ago, I was searching in vain for a YouTube video of one of George Vance’s Progressive Repertoire pieces.

This search proved futile–the best thing I could find was a blurry cell phone video of a 12-year-old playing it at a recital.

Frustrated at not having videos to point my students toward, I broke out my gear and recorded all of volume one and volume two.

These were quick and dirty videos with two simple goals in mind:

1. my left and right hands could be clearly seen
2. they had good sound

I spent one long afternoon filming these first two volumes, putting them out on playlists on YouTube and the blog. I finally got around to filming the more challenging third volume in 2019.

Even though I’ve had a lot more views on other videos, I’ve had a ton of people reach out to me about these Vance videos and thank me for putting them up.

Searching for scales

I realized recently that, although I’ve taught a ton of beginners over the years, this site didn’t have a lot of beginner content. In fact, those Vance videos have probably been the most elementary stuff I’ve put out.

I started brainstorming what else I could offer up. A quick search on YouTube brings up a ton of videos, but most of them didn’t get right to the point. It would usually be someone doing an introduction, talking about this or that, then eventually playing through or talking about the scale.

This is all well and good, but what I want to hear when I search for a scales is… the scale!

That’s why I kind of liked the way I shot those Vance videos. No intro, no talk, no fuss—just me playing them.

The one octave scale project

This seemed like a good place to start in terms of adding more double bass resources to the blog. After all, these are the building blocks for most music, and they’re surprisingly challenging on the bass.

For this project, I decided to do the following:

1 – Play the scale with a close-up on my left hand and each bar on the screen. That way, people can clearly see what’s happening with fingering and hand shape.

2 – Do a mini-lesson where I cover important concepts for that scale and general things to think about as a beginner.

3 – Play the scale one more time with a wide-angle lens, so folks can see everything.

Inspired by Dennis Whittaker’s new Incredibly Useful Exercises YouTube channel, I also put all of the sheet music and basic concepts into a downloadable PDF.

What do you think?

This is an idea that literally popped into my head at 4 am a couple of days ago, so this is an experiment to see if I can up my game in terms of providing useful content for beginners.

I cover a lot of esoteric topics and more advanced resources on the podcast, blog, and YouTube channel, but I feel like I don’t do enough for beginners these days.

Let me know—what do you think? Is this useful? What else would you like? Would a different format be helpful? I’d love your thoughts!