Help Learning Bass Piano Technique for Different Styles

Hello Everybody:

I have been studying piano at college for quite a while, and while I seem to understand the importance of playing classical music, the part that I am really struggling to understand, is to learn how to play different bass styles/techniques for accompaniment, on the piano.

Things like:
-Jazz;
-County Western; Bluegrass,
-Rock; Ballads; Rock N' Roll; Pop,etc...all have different styles of playing and listening to cds, it seems like many are playing "perfect fifths" or walking basslines on the bass guitar...

my question is: When I go and open up a fake-book, or original sheet-music, How can I learn to play many different musical styles/techniques for piano/accompaniment, so that what I am playing will be correct, in the correct music genre...like jazz, pop, countywestern, rock, ballads, blues...etc...

Thanks...any suggestions/ideas?
I hope this kinda made sense...but I would REALLY like to learn how to play different styles of bass technique playing on piano...cause I would also like to get into accompanying and arranging....

_Mitch_

Hi, Mitch:

One thing is to listen to music -- a lot of music, in lots of styles. When your ear becomes used to hearing a style, its sound becomes natural, so that when you start working on a piece in a particular style, you have a feel as to what that style should sound like.

Then simply sit and try to pick out those bass lines until you have a feel for them and until you have a repertoire of "licks".

You're right in that many styles are "bass"-ed around tonic/fifth intervals, simply because those are the tones which provide the most solid harmonic foundation. Sherry can tell you about bass lines.

In popular music styles, it all goes back to ragtime. I suggest you pull out some Scott Joplin or Charles Lamb and conquer the ragtime stride. Once you can hit a ragtime bass line on automatic at 200 BPM, then you can play just about anything else.

Hi David.

Thanks for replying back...

Are there any websites that would show the common bass licks/riffs/grooves taken from popular music styles/genres, instead of just listening to the whole MIDI songs?

Also...it seems that when using the FREE Midi Notate Player, I get some of the piano parts that show up WAY TOO HIGH in the octave range...for some songs,it shows about 3-5 octaves up! (YiKes!!)is there anyway to lower it down, so that it looks correct to a piano player?

Also...I am using the FREE MIDI Notation Player...and there are some songs that I would like to print out, but since there is SO MUCH instrumentation being shown, (bass,drums,violin,piano,etc...,)the song is about 32 long...is there any way to remove the excessive instrumentation, so that I can only have the bass and piano parts on the sheet music online...That way it should be about 2-4pages long...hopefully, like regular piano-sheetmusic...I do have Sonar4 Professional...but I haven't tried it to see if it would do what I am asking for...yet...!!!

Thanks Again!
-Mitch-