lowquality.net

Last week, while I was get­ting my oil changed at Check­ered Flag Toy­ota, I decided to ven­ture down a few blocks to GC (Gui­tar Cen­ter, not Golden Coral) and after play­ing a cou­ple of Fender J-Basses that were in seri­ous need of clean­ing and adjust­ment (as are most of the instru­ments in stock at Gui­tar Cen­ters across the coun­try) I moseyed into the instruc­tion book sec­tion to see if they car­ried any of the Sherr Music books. Instead, I found some­thing that com­pletely dis­gusted and infu­ri­ated me:

Appar­ently Daisy Rock has released a bass method book specif­i­cally aimed at the female student.

Before I get into the most obvi­ous ques­tion this book poses, I will say that, per­son­ally, I have no great love for many of the method books released by the major pub­lish­ers out there. Any book should be rein­forced with real-life musi­cal inter­ac­tion, whether that inter­ac­tion be from an instruc­tor or a group of friends that get together and jam in the garage. Learn­ing music is just like learn­ing a lan­guage, if all you have to guide you is a book you won’t get very far, you need to lis­ten to the lan­guage and have peo­ple there to help you along. That being said, my com­plaint with these begin­ning method books is just that they rely too heav­ily on non­sen­si­cal exer­cises that bore the stu­dent into obliv­ion or waste space with stu­pid pic­tures and charts and do not pro­vide enough use­ful con­tent. The Mel Bay Method is a par­tic­u­larly ago­niz­ing series as it hasn’t been updated since it was writ­ten in the 1950’s and fea­tures a some­what con­fus­ing method of teach­ing the stu­dent how to play bass string by string as opposed to posi­tion by posi­tion (for you lay­men: watch the “Late Show With David Let­ter­man Show” and the house bassist, Will Lee. Pay close atten­tion to how often he moves his whole hand up the fret­board… with few excep­tions he stays in the range of the first four or five frets, or the first posi­tion. If a begin­ning stu­dent were to learn from the start that all 12 pitches can be played in that first posi­tion, many of them would not quit after the first three months.)

So, this Daisy Rock book is ridicu­lous because it is not only in the same cat­e­gory as many of these other lame instruc­tional books but it pre­tends to be a tome of empow­er­ment for aspir­ing young female musi­cians. This book, writ­ten by Daisy Rock founder, Tish Car­avolo (a woman), offers noth­ing new or inno­v­a­tive other than pic­tures of female bassists (more on that later). As far as the con­tent goes, this book is no bet­ter or worse than any of the other begin­ning method books on the mar­ket. The big ques­tion remains: What does being a girl (or boy) have to do with learn­ing a musi­cal instrument?