How To Play Bass Guitar: Your Fingers Are Your Resource

Are you aware that your fingers are your active capital for learning how to play bass guitar?

Hopefully you are already. The sooner you realize this fact the sooner you can take good care of them and train them properly.

Just like for any guitar player your fingers have to be fast, relaxed, flexible.

But also they have to be strong.

Continuous finger training is often overlooked and not considered to be important.

Most beginners concentrate on learning scales, chords, rhythm or the sound of their bass but they lack to train their fingers.

Every beginner and far more every advanced bass player has to be aware that hands and fingers are almost always overlooked when it comes to training.

Go to any gym – you can work out in thousands of different ways – but try to find just one course that concentrates on this incredible tool that made mankind so effective: the human hand.

There are several ways to do it but today I want to recommend a practice that I use since years and it benefits me more than any other kind of finger training:

QiGong Balls

No, I don’t want to push you into new age or eastern mysticism.

Used regularly these balls will keep your fingers lissome.

You will gain strength quite fast without even noticing it.

In order to improve blood circulation and agility in the fingers Qigong balls have been used for centuries in Chinese medicine.

The Qigong balls are placed into the palm of the hands and rotated with the help of the fingers.

The movements cause the muscles in the hand and the lower arm to regularly tense and relax.

You may not be interested in the therapeutic side effects although you may experience some positive effects that could surprise you when using them regularly.

I suggest to work with these balls on a daily basis for about ten to fifteen minutes.

That’s absolutely enough.

You can do it while listening to music, watching TV, talking on the phone…

The obvious main benefits of consistent training with these balls are:

• they stimulate motor activity in the hand
• they exercise the hand and arm muscles
• they loosen the tissue and stimulate blood circulation in the hands
• they strengthen hands and fingers without overstraining them

(You can find more resources when doing some research on the internet for terms like “Qi Gong Balls“, “Chinese Health Balls” or “Chinese Exercise Balls“.)

There are a lot more ways to train the fingers and I will mention some other methods in later posts.

Think about it and start to sense your hands as your most important physical resources when you start to learn how to play bass guitar.

Until next time.