Bass Lessons Los Angeles

                                                                                                                                -Olin Georgescu

I teach music lessons in Los Angeles to students of all ages, and at all levels of experience, teaching guitar and piano to beginning and intermediate students, and teaching electric and upright bass at all levels. Whether you or your child want to begin studying basic piano, bass, or guitar, or you want to expand your existing musical skills by studying advanced jazz theory, I can provide you a worth lifetime of practical, applicable musical experience and one-on-one music lessons. I teach music everywhere throughout Los Angeles, CA.

My upright bass instruction is geared towards the player who intends to play pizz, as I am primarily a pop and jazz player, and not an orchestral bass player. However, I studied orchestral bass with Oscar Meza, Assistant Principal Bassist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and therefore a considerable amount of arco is incorporated into my teaching method.

My electric bass instruction is geared towards the practical application of music in the real world. Scales, arpeggios, and jazz theory are the building blocks of my method, but I ultimately expect my students to master the art of performing well in a live situation or a recording session, where they will need to quickly digest a piece of music and give the producer or band leader what they are looking for.

When I teach bass lessons, my focus is on transmitting real, applicable musical information. I am not overly concerned with chops and technique, although these things are important inasmuch as they serve the music. Personally I feel that the highest priority is understanding the role of your instrument (in my case, the bass) in the music you are playing. In a sense, I feel that it is more important to understand music than it is to understand the bass. If we develop a comprehensive understanding of music, of songs, of composition, we find that the instrument plays itself. Of course, technique is important. You can't play the dots if you don't have the chops. But, I generally focus on technique only to the extent that it serves the music.

As a result, when I teach bass lessons, I tend to focus on the following things: Grooves, song analysis, and reading. During each lesson, I try to throw a little bit of each of these at my student. Each week, I will have you dissect and internalize a different groove. One week it may be Latin, one week it may be Motown, and one week it may be swing. I do this because if you understand the basic grooves that make up Western music, you begin to see the patterns that show up again and again in different types of music. If you have a solid understanding of blues, funk, jazz, swing, country, Latin, and rock grooves, and you have studied and learned what the masters have played in order to articulate those grooves, when you encounter a new tune, you can play a bass part that really makes it happen in a confidant and supportive manner. Every song we hear is driven by that bass part, and if the bass player has a strong and clear rhythmic and harmonic concept from which they are fashioning a bass line, everything works. If the bass player doesn't really get it, then nothing works.

Read about the specific areas of focus that I tend to concentrate on when teaching upright and electric bass lessons below. Also, take a look at my blog posts on music theory. These articles are an excellent primer on music theory, and if you review these while studying with me, we can devote more of our time during each lesson to practical application of these concepts. Each of these blog posts offer highly detailed descriptions of basic musical theory concepts. I highly suggest reading each post thoroughly and then utilizing our time together to discuss ideas that need clarification.