Do Scales Matter?

Perhaps more than you might think...

I’ve been through so many incredible scale books over the years and am probably best known for talking about Hanon throughout my career. It was a random book I found in my house as a kid, and basically milked it for everything I could because I simply didn’t have anything else and didn’t know any better.

Hanon became Arban’s, which became Slonimsky, and so my journey through music books continued, never once settling on one that was written specifically for bass.

For the past year, I’ve been working on amalgamating all that information and experience into what we’re tentatively calling The Bassist’s Book of Scales and Arpeggios, and I’m launching the pre-sale for it right now!

It will come as a signed physical book bundled with a digital version and includes basically everything I’ve learned over the past 30 years about the application of scales to improve technique, vocabulary, and complete knowledge of the instrument.

The book contains scales and arpeggios from the basic major and minor through to exotic sounds like the Hungarian Minor, Double Harmonic Major, and Ukrainian Dorian. (YES! That’s actually a thing…)

Everything is in standard notation, Bass TAB, and is in all-twelve-keys. There are 100’s of exercises based on all the scales in the book that include pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic frameworks, as well as broken-chord studies, multiple fingering options, and everything in two octaves laid out for the standard 4-string bass.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or (like me) a complete lunatic when it comes to the bass, this is a manual that can be used by literally everyone who plays the instrument.

The official launch date is November 27th, and the pre-sale, at this discounted price, will end on November 26th at midnight.

You can order OUTSIDE THE U.S. by clicking HERE, and domestically IN THE U.S. by clicking HERE.

I can’t wait to share this with you and make what has been mine for so long yours to use every day.

More soon,

Janek