How to train your left hand to be a double bass “pitch magnet”

I found a simple exercise that has been really helping to get my left hand to hand securely on pitches.

With Jason Heath · San Francisco, CA

This is a simple technique that I find myself using all the time, and it’s based around the natural harmonics on the bass.

Really, any harmonic will work on the bass for this. But the ones that I predominantly use are the tuning harmonics over the “5th and 7th” fret, plus the octave harmonic.

I don’t understand why this works, but it does. The more I warm up on those harmonics, the more my hand just “snaps” to these places on the string, like there are magnets in my fingers. It’s pretty cool!

One is that if I can find a few notes with confide, I can find everything else on the bass, since pretty much everything is just one step away from a natural harmonic.

If I just spend a little bit of every practice session, and I’ll sprinkle this throughout my whole practice session, I find that incredibly useful for my practicing.

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