Rock & Roll 101

April 14th, 2025

We spent the lesson just practising the bass line for All Star.

April 7th, 2025

Kaley will keep working on Smells Like Teen Spirit, and we also briefly looked at All Star.

March 31st, 2025

We played through All The Stars - good job! We then added Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit,

We wrote out the rhythm of this using "tah" and "tee tee" to help communicate the speed of each note.

March 24th, 2025

We added a new song by Kendrick Lamar and SZA today, called All The Stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvOh7vVqlaE

This gave us an opportunity to start learning some notes and where the notes are on the fretboard. I drew out a diagram for Kaley to show her the placement on the first 6 frets on all four strings.

We then played through the song a few times, with the rhythm. I showed her how to just touch the strings to make them a bit faster.

March 17th, 2025

We reviewed Animals, and worked on the rhythm of it for a bit. I showed her what dotted eighth rhythm looks like when written out. After that, we added a new song by Ava Max called Salt, and went over it together.

March 10th, 2025

We tried working on Come On, but it was a little tricky for Kaley to move her hands on the frets fast enough. We decided to try something else that didn't have a bass line, but first looked at Seven Nation Army. I wrote out tab for her, but she kept losing her spot, so I suggested she wasn't quite ready for these kinds of songs yet.

We decided to add Animals by Maroon 5, which has a bit more manageable chord progression.

March 10th, 2025

March 3rd, 2025

We started out with reviewing Havana and Austin -- I accidentally gave Kaley the wrong number for one of the chords.

After that we added Kyle Exum, Come On:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S6mOqznWtw

February 24th, 2025

We went through Light Switch together, and then Kaley had a bit of trouble with Bad Habits, so we spent a bit of time explaining that before going through it.

We also did Austin and Havana -- for Austin I kind of explained the 5ths for the quarter note country thing, but didn't have time to do it together.

February 10th, 2025

Kaley came at the 3pm spot today.

We went over Champagne Problems and Maroon again - Kaley was sick so couldn't practise much this week.

We then added two new songs: Light Switch and Bad Habits.

February 3rd, 2025

Kaley brought in the other bass today. We reviewed the number scale we started last week and then used it to play through Driver's License.

After that I suggested we learn a couple of easy songs that don't require moving around too much and use the same pattern for the whole song. We did Champagne Problems and Maroon.

January 27th, 2025

Today we reviewed the names of the parts of the bass, and then learned the easy 1,2,3,4,5,6 scale. We tried it out on some random numbers, and then with Drivers License by Olivia Rodrigo.
I gave her a sheet of paper with the numbers for each chord on it up until the end of the chorus.

January 20th, 2025

This was Kaley's first lesson, and she decided to learn the bass. We started with names of the bass parts, and then a simple fingering exercise on the 3rd fret.

See you next week!