Teaching Yourself to Play an Instrument with no Internet

By 2021 apprenticeAdriaan Van Duuren Storms

This blog article is about my experience of teaching myself to play songs on my bass guitar in rural Costa Rica with no acces to online help and with no knowledge of any musical theory.

My main goal for practicing the bass is to have a hobby that I like and can improve on while having lots of fun exploring new songs and styles. Back in Belgium where I lived, I had a small band with some friends of mine. We mainly enjoyed playing together and creating good vibration for ourselves. You might ask yourself why I picked the bass guitar instead of a different instrument. Well, when I was younger and my dad was younger, he used to play bass guitar in his studio and listen to a lot of good music. When my father decided to put an end to his bass hobby I took some of his electric instruments and his amplifier over to start learning myself. While I was very interested in learning the bass guitar, I had decided to take an apprenticeship in permaculture here in rural Mastatal. By making this decision I had made it very dificult to continue my hobby due to the lack of internet at Rancho Mastatal. Since I could not bring my amplifier with me to support my electric bass, I needed to find an acoustic bass guitar. After a few clicks on the world wide web I found a company that made semi acoustic bass guitars perfect to take with you on a plane.

Not long after I had bought the instrument.

I arrived at the Ranch in Mastatal with my acoustic bass and a few tabs of songs that I would like to learn before I return to Belgium. I had downloaded the same songs on my ipad so that I could listen to them while playing. When I started to practice my acoustic bass, it was like learning an entirely new instrument with limited support. Once I had learned one song by listening to it and playing along with the help of my tabs, I would continue with the next one. Now this might sound very simple to you when you read this, but believe me when I say that you will have moments where you will want to spend days on end playing your instrument and days when you won't even want to think of playing. This, together with a lot of work and not so much time during the day to practice, makes the process of course much harder. Eventually you will start to get the hang of it and feel a boost in your learning.

Now here I am, halfway through the appranticeship and I cannot wait to play all these new songs that I have learned with my friends back in Belgium. I am still learning new songs that I have brought with me and hope I will learn a lot more before I actually go back. I would recommend learning songs that you like to listen to, to keep your interest high and maximize your learning curve.

One of my big dreams is to be able to perform some songs with a band for an audience.

I hope my experience can be helpful to you.