i have been really trying to get into practicing my reading every day this year,
the only thing im struggling with atm is deciding what positions to play in so i dont end up in awkward places

I just searching for the bass tips related blog and i found yours, You are posting awesome post, keep rocking us with your bass lessons ans tips.

Proper notation books do seem to be hard to come by – if people want to send me recommendations that would be cool, and I’ll do a write up.

Can you recomend any decent books with Bass notation only?

See middle C written on the ledger line between and betwixt the bass and treble clef’s? You should be playing a C an octave below that, (which is what the 8vb means “play it an octave lower”) at the 5th fret on the G string. You can take it from there.

But don’t forget, you are a bass player – you’re hired to interpret the music and scores are just primitive and highly inaccurate recording devices anyway!

That can be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s helpful for a beginner but might be viewed as ‘restrictive’ for a pro. Scores can be marked up with fingers etc, but it is pretty rare to see them like that – mostly because the person scoring would probably view that as ‘obvious’ even thought it might not be to every one.

But there are more than 3 representations of C on the bass neck (8 on a four string if I count correctly), so I’ve never understood which note is where.

Look, I don’t actually play bass, yet. I’m trying to learn again after first trying 30 years ago.

30 years ago I was also studying in the music department of a college. I let the intimidation of being surrounded by people who’d been playing classical instruments since they were small children stop me from pursuing music. But one thing I came away from that experience with was, at the time, the ability to read music at a basic level. I couldn’t play an instrument worth beans, and I couldn’t sing, but I could, at least, tell where I was in the score.

So if you can play, you’ve got more than half the battle done. Learning to read music is easy in comparison. At least at the single clef level.

I’ve noticed a lot of current instructional material has both notation and tabs together. That should make it super easy for folks like Brinker who’re already comfortable with tabs.

So give it a try! You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Brinker – it isn’t as hard as it first looks. I’d say crack things in this order:

1. Know which lines and spaces represent each note (basically memorising, just as you did when you learnt which note waas on each fret).
2. Understand flats and sharps (and how they work with key signatures)
3. Get to grips with the note lengths.

Others will have alternative suggestions. That is what worked for me.