How difficult is it to learn bass guitar?

Every bass guitarist I know (including myself) learned regular guitar first, learned the basics of chord progression, base lines, etc. and THEN went to the bass guitar and it was like a toy, the transition was almost trivial. Not to say that there’s not a long way to go, but any guitarist could play a bass in ten minutes well enough to just back up a rock group or something.

If you’re starting from scratch, it’s like any other instrument. You can learn to read music, but you probably don’t have to. You should understand about chords and ‘song structure’ and chord progression. You can get a few friends to come over and show you a few things. You need to practice until you develop muscle memories, until the instrument feels natural under your fingers. Compared to a violin or a trumpet it would be very easy because you don’t have to work on tone production. You don’t need to learn a whole lot before you can play at all, but you can learn a lot.

The bad thing about a bass is that you can’t play it by itself very well. The good thing is that you can practice along with records or the radio.
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