I am self-taught on electric bass and I'm currently working with a double bassist who learned to play in a much more conventional sense than I did. My musical education consists of watching videos of other people do things an emulating them, so while my bass skills are natural to me, I have trouble articulating these thoughts to others.
A particular jazz chart we are both working on uses many high notes and octave(+) intervals. Due to my experience playing notes like this, I was able to work out ideal fingering patterns. I tabulated these here for reference.
My co-bassist, however, has no experience with using high positions. As she was taught to play traditional orchestra music, she does not have a good understanding of how bassists use the different possible fingerings of each note to make pieces easy, or even possible, to play. In general, she only uses one fingering for each pitch and does not know of ways to find alternate fingerings on different strings.
I'll describe an example. In the piece I linked above, the only way she knew how to play the first part of measure #1 was by sliding between 3rd position F on the D string and 10th position F on the G string; she did not realize that 8th position on the A string could be substituted for the first F.
I am eager to teach her the process to finding the easier ways to fret pieces of music, and she is eager to learn, but I have hit a roadblock since I cannot communicate the internal tricks I use to find optimal fingerings. Can anyone recommend a good strategy (or refer me to some resources) for teaching these tricks?
