Learning to play "Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream on Bass Guitar

I've always wanted to be able to play musical instruments. I love music and I'm in awe of musicians' technical skills, their manual dexterity, control, and coordination. I have tried to learn guitar in the past, but it was just too hard to learn. Even when I learned easy songs I never felt like I sounded quite right or really understood what I was doing. I could play every song on the Guitar Hero video games on expert mode, but my real guitar would spend most of the time sat in its stand collecting dust. It seemed impossible to become proficient at guitar, it seemed like something certain people were just born with, or like a magic trick. I couldn't imagine myself as a musician.

Now as an adult I want to see if I have the discipline to really commit to learning. I bought a bass guitar and I've found an endless amount of Youtube tutorials and tabs I can use to learn. I chose to learn bass because it seems a little easier to wrap my head around than something like the guitar. It has only four strings compared to the guitar's six. Bass lines are generally played one note at a time and there's a lot of repetition. It's more about the groove and feel, the backbone of the music, than something like the guitar which seems more complex to me. The bass guitar is also used in almost every kind of popular music, including jazz, funk, soul, hip-hop, and R&B, in which the guitar may not necessarily be as prevalent.

My plan to start becoming a more intermediate musician is to consistently cover songs right at the edge of my skill level. I am going to break songs and techniques down into little things to learn and I am going to practice over and over until I get those parts down. I will use the power of discipline and consistency to amass a collection of songs I've learned over time.

I do have some experience playing the acoustic guitar, so I am not a complete beginner to stringed instruments, but I am certainly no maestro. I can play some basic chords on guitar and play some dinky little riffs poorly. I have played around with my bass since buying it too. I have gotten used to its thick strings and the calluses they leave on my fingers. I have learned a collection of little riffs from a bunch of famous songs, but I haven't had the patience or motivation to learn full songs until now.

I chose "Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream as my first song to cover because it is right at the edge of my skill level as a beginner. It is relatively slow and simple, and it is repetitive. It doesn't require a ton of memorization and it's a riff I'm familiar with, as I grew up listening to a lot of classic rock and watching movies like "Goodfellas" and "School of Rock" in which it is featured.

To learn the song on bass I went to Youtube to look for a tab or lesson. Youtube tabs are not always accurate, but for my skill level I just want to play through a song with something that at least sounds reasonably close. Youtube is free and full of tabs and lessons, so it's an accessible source of endless fun musical challenges.

Here's the tab I chose to learn from:

My previous experience with instruments is just learning little bits and pieces, so learning a full song is something new to me. So the goal for this particular challenge was to learn how to be able to play through a full song, memorize different parts and be able to switch between them, be able to keep time with the rest of the track, and to maintain concentration for 4 minutes.

To learn the song I listened closely to the bass for each separate part, and learned the tab slowly, note by note. Once I could play through each section at full speed, I attempted to play through the entire song. During the first few playthroughs my mind would blank and I would lose my place in the song or completely forget what I was supposed to play. Each playthrough got less and less sloppy until I was satisfied with my results. At a certain point it almost becomes auto-pilot and you put very little thought into playing the song.

For learning this song in particular, there were some friction points for me. The main riff has little bends in the strings for some notes that were a little hard to execute consistently for me as a beginner. The sections at the end of the chorus sections leading into the verse sections have odd timing and are subtly different every time. The main riff was played the same way pretty consistently except for one change up in the second half of the song. Plus it was just hard just to repeat the same thing over and over without completely messing up.

Here's me playing through the song, all in one take:

This was a humbling experience. Even though I feel like I can generally hit the right notes, playing a song the right way involves so much more than that. Note lengths, timing, note volume, and much more are involved if you want to sound right. I have found it really challenging to avoid having strings unintentionally ringing out when playing bass too. Picking up my fretting fingers seems to leave those strings ringing out.

I'm pretty sure experienced musicians would find my performance hard to listen to. But I've got to start somewhere. A big reason for doing this learning blog is to let go of perfectionism and to just give things my best try. Even if my shot at this song isn't perfect I still learned a lot from attempting it and I can use these lessons moving forwards. I am eager to learn more songs and techniques, and I'm curious where consistent disciplined practice can take me.