Bassist and educator Todd Johnson (my bass teacher) has a great series of videos where he plays through standard tunes. He provides a bass line, solo and even chords to comp. I’ve decided to use this to improve my ear and transcribe lines. The cool thing is it includes a video and written music. I never check the written music until after I finished to compare notes. I also usually only use the audio to figure out what is going on.

Below are my attempts at learning two choruses of his solos on Blue Bossa.

The last video was also my first attempt at using Garageband to record audio and iMovie to handle video. The result is a much better sounding file. I’ll provide recording details later but I may be using this much more in the future.