Who is the Tony Grey Bass Academy for?

Find out if the Bass Academy is for you – from the man himself

Well, the academy is for a bassist really at any level. My philosophy was really to unlearn the things that I thought I knew and relearn them, but making sure that I have a creative path to a specific goal.

Being goal oriented is so important. So each of these lessons is structured to take you on a path to just kind of unlock creative tools as you go.

I like to think of it as chipping away at the creative rock.

So, there are a lot of different subjects and courses, I’m going to help you break these things down so you can really kind of tailor them to your specific needs.

You might want to work on your grooves or developing your own lines to play different genres. So we’ve got you covered there.

You might want to brush up on your technique and really kind of fine tune it. We’ve got courses on technique, ear training, understanding harmony.

We’re all kind of at different levels. I’ve had students who know everything about harmony, but really had a hard time finding a creative path with it. It’s almost like when you have too much information, it can be difficult to make that choice in the moment. Because when you’re improvising, it’s about letting go and expressing yourself in the moment and reacting to whatever else is going on.

What I am trying to do or what I’m doing here is breaking down these simple academic concepts one at a time. And like I said, learning how to kind of express and really understand the theory, but also understand how these notes or these group of notes are affecting you emotionally.

So you learn how to really sing with this stuff. And the goal is to really start to hear music as color instead of just a a group of notes that fit into a a specific box.

One problem bass players typically have is we tend to get stuck in vertical ranges. The bass is tuned in fourth, so it’s a very symmetrical instrument. So it’s easy in the sense that it’s comfortable to learn scales, pentatonic scales, modes, etcetera, in one vertical range, and you can do what you need to do within that range.

But the problem is when we start shifting, we then we start to kind of fish around, that’s where we lose our confidence or our awareness of the notes or where we are or where we want to go. And then it just becomes kind of automatic pilot.

We’re at the mercy of stuff we’re already familiar with instead of being able to just express or develop an idea that we have. So that’s one of the things that we really do focus on in the academy is learning how to take these vertical ranges and start expanding them in a more economical way so you really can start to feel the intervals and have control of where you’re going.

So that can be used in grooving. It can be used in soloing and even your writing. You start to think more linear like a piano instead of like just a a vertical box.

So before I go, I just want to mention that these lessons are not specifically for the four string, five string, six string basses. They’re applicable for all bass sizes. The fingering patterns, the whole range fingering patterns are available for all bass sizes. So if you’re just playing a p bass or a j bass, I’ve got you covered. If you’re playing a six string bass with 24 frets, we also have all of the ranges in the fingering patterns for those two.