The Real Reason You’re Not Getting Better (It’s Not Your Gear)

By Igor Odaryuk · Updated September 3, 2026

The hardest part is making the decision to actually start.

You bought a course from Hadrien Feraud, Janek Gwizdala, or Tony Grey — all incredible players with fantastic online resources. Maybe you booked a private lesson with Evan Marien — never met him personally but I’m sure he’s a great dude. On top of that you grabbed a few books in PDF or paperback, ordered new strings, maybe even a new bass. Wow — you’re finally at that stage in life where price isn’t the first thing you think about.

But here’s the trap. And everyone falls into it. Every single one of us.

You might actually enjoy the preparation more than the practice itself. Researching the best learning materials, comparing courses, reading reviews, watching gear demos — you spend all your free time on this and genuinely believe that once you buy just one more thing (hello, fellow perfectionists) for your home studio, then you’ll finally sit down and plan when to actually start practicing. Buying gear, choosing a course, picking a teacher — all of it makes you feel incredibly busy. Not a minute wasted. You’re deep in the process of choosing! Serious business!

But at some point you have to be honest with yourself: the preparation phase is way more fun than what comes after.

After the first lesson. After the first couple dozen exercises from that course you bought. After the first 3–6 months of “learning” where you jump from thing to thing but never focus on what would actually help you in your specific musical situation.

And here’s where it gets real. The fear of doing the work.

The books are bought. The courses are paid for. The invoices for private lessons are sitting in your inbox. Now the actual work is supposed to begin — and suddenly “unavoidable circumstances” start popping up. Things that steal your time, drain your motivation, make you feel apathetic. Your brain starts rejecting new exercises (“why do I need scales when I just want to slap?!”). And other progress-killing forces show up uninvited.

After enough of this back-and-forth — where preparation feels amazing but actual practice feels like garbage — your brain builds an association: learning = boring, but shopping for gear and getting ready to learn = thrilling. That’s the moment you need to ask yourself honestly: what is all of this for? To enjoy a week of picking out a bass and accessories, only to sell everything two weeks later?

I just want to remind everyone — myself included — that taking responsibility for your actions is a skill. And it’s one that helps you make better decisions in every area of life. If bass isn’t bringing you joy anymore, take a break. If it used to bring you joy, maybe you just need more time away from the instrument. Try an experiment: put the bass down for a month, two months, six months. Then pick it up and see how you feel. If it’s still dead inside — move on. That takes character. That takes guts. It’s actually a really useful exercise in self-awareness. And the beauty of it is that you can replace “bass guitar” with literally anything in your life.

That’s it. That’s the whole damn thing.

A ten-second test: is this preparation or practice?

Here is the test I use on myself. If what I am doing right now would still be useful if I never touched the bass again, it is preparation. Reading a review, comparing two courses, watching a demo, organising PDFs into folders, choosing strings: all of it survives without an instrument. Practice does not. Practice is the thing that only exists while the bass is in your hands and a metronome or a track is running. Ten seconds of honesty, and you know which side of the line you are on.

The reason this matters is that both activities produce the same feeling of progress. Your brain does not distinguish between “I learned which bass to buy” and “I learned to play the line.” Both feel like a step forward. Only one of them changes what comes out of the speaker.

The 7-day start protocol I give students

When someone comes to me with three courses and no callouses, I do not give them a fourth course. I give them this. It is deliberately small, because the goal of the first week is not to get good, it is to break the association between “bass” and “shopping.”

• Day 1. Pick one song you already love with a bassline you can hum. Not a hard one. Find the root notes of the first section on the fretboard and play them with the recording, badly, for ten minutes. Stop.
• Day 2. Same section, same ten minutes. Add the rhythm of the real line if you can hear it, and do not worry if you cannot.
• Day 3. Record thirty seconds of yourself on your phone. Do not listen to it yet. The point is that a recording exists.
• Day 4. Listen to the recording once. Write down the single worst thing about it in one sentence. That sentence is your practice plan for the rest of the week.
• Day 5 and 6. Ten minutes a day on that one sentence. Nothing else. No new videos, no new gear pages, no forums.
• Day 7. Record the same thirty seconds again and compare the two clips. You will hear a difference, and that difference is the first real evidence you have ever produced that practice works for you specifically, not for people in videos.

Seventy minutes for the whole week. Less time than most people spend choosing a course. If you get to day seven, the second week takes care of itself, because now you have a recording that is slightly better than the last one and a brain that wants the next one.

Where I still catch myself

I have played for 25 years and I am not immune. I review basses for a living on my channel, which is a very respectable way to spend an evening reading about pickups instead of practicing. The tell is always the same: the day I notice I have opened a gear page and not a practice file, I know I am avoiding something specific, usually a passage I am not playing cleanly. The gear page is the comfortable version of the problem.

So the rule I keep is simple. Preparation is allowed only after practice, never instead of it. Ten minutes on the instrument buys the right to read about instruments. Some days that is the whole trick. If you want a place to start that is already narrowed down, the free slap starter pack is five videos and no decisions to make, which is exactly the point.

This ties into a question I get constantly: can you really learn bass online?

If you’re still at the very start, don’t overthink it — just learn the notes on the fretboard and play.