How I Learned it- “Hot For Teacher” by Van Halen
How I Learned It will be a new series we’ll be running here on TheBassChannel.net where I (and others, you if you email me at doug@thebasschannel.net) go through my learning process when it comes to getting cover songs under my fingers and out of my amp. Everyone learns differently and this is a great opportunity for us to talk about how we learn, what we look for, and what our processes are. In this way we can learn from each other, because there’s something to take from everyone’s way of doing something. For instance, I’m a relatively new player, having played for less than three years. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from my process, but it does mean I probably do things differently from others who will (hopefully) contribute to this series.
How I Learned It will also help us get into the heads of some of our favorite bands and bass players. Who hasn’t had a revelation about a song, band, or player they love while learning to play their parts?
How do you learn?
Edward Van Halen revolutionized the guitar. I tweeted this the day he died, but without overstating things, every single guitar player who has played a note since 1978 was influenced in some way by Eddie. That’s not to say that everyone wanted to sound like him or play like him. I’m quite sure that he pushed a lot of players in the opposite direction. A player like Blixa Bargeld would probably say, if asked, (and I want to note I don’t know if he did, I’m guessing based on other things he has said about the guitar) that he wanted to play guitar as differently from EVH as he possibly could. This is still an influence.
Right now some of you might be be thinking, “Doug, this is The BASS Channel. Not The Guitar Channel. Why are you talking about him?” And the rest of you are hushing those people because you understand 1) that Eddie’s influence stretched well beyond our thin-stringed brethren and 2) he was a monumental figure in music and to ignore his passing because he played the wrong instrument would be unjust. Eddie changed all of music, not just shred guitar, not just party time rock and roll. We must bow to that.
Thank you for the music, Eddie.
I also have to talk about Eddie because this week I learned a Van Halen song. And even when you’re talking about a Michael Anthony bass part, you’re still talking about Eddie and Alex Van Halen. Not because, as Eddie would sometimes suggest, Eddie had to show Michael the parts. But because bass is the link between the guitars and the drums so, since Van Halen had no rhythm guitarist, Michael Anthony had to play the lukewarm water to their fire and ice.
I picked “Hot for Teacher” for two simple reasons. Firstly, it’s a great damn song. It’s the first song I think I latched onto as a fledgling Van Halen fan twenty some-odd years ago when someone, probably my step-dad, first pointed them out on the radio. And second, I’m a teacher in real life. Yes, I know that’s actually kinda weird given the lyrical content, but my now-wife then-girlfriend still thinks it’s funny when I sing it for her in the car.
To learn the song I started in two places- First, I listened to the song differently than I usually do. I’m sure I’m not the only one who, after learning an instrument, started to pick up things in songs you’d never heard before. “Oh, the bass is doing that under there, I’d never paid attention to that before. That’s a cool part.” As is so often with bass parts, I noticed things I knew were there, but hadn’t appreciated before. So it was time to listen to “Hot for Teacher” again and see if there was anything interesting going on with the bass.
I found that there is, in a way. Remember, Van Halen has no rhythm guitar player and a lot of their songs don’t have Eddie overdubbing a guitar part. Michael Anthony is carrying all that weight. So I noticed that you can hear he’s probably playing with a pick*, which I don’t, and that means there’s a real quick bounce to the notes because he’s matching Alex’s double kick with what I assume is a down-up stroke. That told me I wouldn’t be able to just watch his hand to figure out how I would play it because we play differently. I would quickly find that trying to play that with a hard strike is pretty damn tiring after four minutes if you’re not used to it. I also found that there aren’t that many fills in the song, Michael Anthony plays it pretty straight. We will come back to this, because I think it’s important.
The second thing I do is search the interwebs for tab. Before you rush to the comments to tell me how unreliable tab can be, I know, my 0-3-5 friends. But I need to start somewhere and I don’t trust my ears. I use Ultimate Guitar because I’ve got the app on my phone and I paid for the Pro version because I use the app so much it seemed unfair not to give them a few bucks for the extra services it provides.
When I printed the tab (yes, I’m an Old and I don’t like working from tab on a computer because, as you’ll see, I mark it up) I played through the first page or so just to check what it sounds like against the song. I’ve been burned before by bad tab and spent way too long working on something that would have been clearly wrong if I’d just slowed down a little. Tab seemed right. On to the next phase.
Phase two involves playing the tab over and over in sections without the song. Sometimes this works against me and I have to abandon it because there are bass parts out there that, out of context do not sound like the song you’re trying to learn. I’m looking at you, “Werewolves of London.” “Hot for Teacher’s” bass sounds like “Hot for Teacher” so this was not an issue. I can play at my pace and focus on getting the parts under my fingers before I worry about the way they bounce. It also helps me make mental notes about what goes where. With this song I quickly noted that it’s all root notes, octaves, and chromatics. There’s nothing fancy happening here. No wild fills, no bass gymnastics. There’s the dreaded Fill That Happens Once And Then Never Again, but it happens under what I think of as the bridge and what the tab call the “pre-chorus”- the “I think of all the education that I missed” part right before the chromatic breakdown- and that only happens twice in the song. So it wasn’t like when you’re learning a Rush song and Geddy does something weird one time and then never again and you’re supposed to remember it after seven minutes of trying to remember everything else he does.
In Phase Three I start playing along to the song at 75% speed. YouTube is great for this. You hit that setting gear, drop the speed, and you’re good to go. Can’t go any lower than 75% though because then things distort too much and what you’re listening to become unrecognizable unless you did a lot of ludes in the 70s. I assume it’s how Steven Tyler listens to YouTube regularly, is what I’m saying. Phase Three also means I can get out my pen and start marking up my tab as things that I’ve bee practicing turn out to be slightly wrong. Most often, as was the case here, it’s either that the counts are bad or the tab author labeled a part as connected to one thing when it’s clearly connected to something else. For example, to the side you’ll see that the tab author missed one part of the verse completely and then added the final riff of the verse to the pre-chorus section. Now, those two things are always played next to each other, but in my head it made much more sense to group them differently.
Phase Three loves to give me a false sense of confidence as I forget that 75% speed is 25% slower than the actual tempo. 25% is what’s known in math terms as “quite a bit, actually.” I also tend to ignore parts that look complicated in Phase Three and focus on main riffs. My bass teacher told me once that if you nail down those and you fudge the fancy parts and had to play the song right now the only people who would notice are other bass players. It’s a confidence thing for me. I can play 90% of the song without thinking about it, now I can focus all my energy on that last weird looking ten percent. I found a bass boosted YouTube video too, which helped a lot.
The tab author was unclear with the ending so I had to clarify it for myself. It’s not actually 1/2 though, it’s the whole thing, but it switches to the 2345 earlier than the tab notes. Also, yes that says “slidey rock noises”.
In the case of “Hot for Teacher” that weird looking ten percent was under the solo. I will be completely honest here, because we’re learning from each other- it’s not that hard. But it looked different from everything else and intimidated me so I tagged it mentally and moved on. Once I was confident in playing along with the song at 75%, vamping on the main riff under the solo, I took my first real good look at the solo. Oh…it’s a bunch of octaves and a few chromatic things. It’s actually really easy to remember, it just looked like a lot tabbed out. Sweet. Got it fairly quick.
“Fairly quick.” Now is as good a time as any to talk about that. Music is not a contest, and yet I think a lot of us can’t help but to compare ourselves to other players. I write for The Bass Channel. We regularly put up covers by the Josh Beast (aka the Mountain the Rocks, aka Thunderfingers), the best cover bassist on YouTube. I don’t know how quickly he could have learned this, but I bet it would be quicker than me. I do know that I’m proud that I went from zero to being able to record myself playing it in four days, that’s really good for me. I know others could learn it in one night. It’s not a hard song. But I needed time, especially to get used to the quick rhythm of the pedal on the A. If you’re off by just a little everything sounds really wrong. A lot of Phase Three (and Phase Two and Phase Four) is getting out of the way of my ego.
In Phase Four is moving up to 100% speed. It’s also normally finding other bass covers of the song to see if anyone is doing anything differently than I am. Sometimes I will do that earlier if I’m having a hell of a time hearing a part. Watching other people play is a huge benefit because I’m a visual learner (nerdy teacher note- learning styles aren’t actually a thing in the hard and fast way we used to say, but people still don’t all learn the same either). I don’t know what I would have done in the Old Time, moving the needle back and forth on a record.
Phase Four for this song was a long about playing lighter with my right hand. I like to hit hard, I like that percussive sound. But this part is pretty quick for the whole song and I was wearing my hand out and needing to take a lot of breaks until I remembered what my bass teacher and Paolo Rossi (bassist for Fleshgod Apocalypse who is doing Zoom lessons during the pandemic, which I took) told me- play lighter, let the amp do the work. So I had to consciously lighten my strike and shorten my swing and that helped a lot.
credit- https://images.app.goo.gl/4664ipeWVwTmTP4X6
Before I post the fruits of my labors (it doesn’t count if you say you learned a song but you don’t make a video of yourself playing it, after all), I want to touch on Michael Anthony as a player. I get the feeling he doesn’t get much love in the musician community. He would be a great candidate for a Holding It Down. When someone talks about Michael Anthony’s contribution to Van Halen they always say, “Oh, his harmonies. What a voice.” They never mention his low end. But the short version is- based on this song, Michael Anthony is a great bass player. He’s not fancy and he’s not tricksy and he shouldn’t be. Can you imagine if Van Halen had a super technical bass player along with Eddie and Alex, all while Dave is out there doing Dave things? That, my friends, is not a party rock band. That’s a prog band. That band doesn’t write “Panama” and “Jump” and all those other perfect rock and roll songs. If you were trying to create an all-time excellent rock and roll band, would you rather have John Myung or Michael Anthony on bass? I’d want Michael Anthony. He’s got time you could set a metronome to and he holds everything that’s happening around him together and he lets everything work. Dude plays The Song. Van Halen isn’t Van Halen is Michael Anthony isn’t showing up with his ridiculous Jack Daniels bass and keeping everything on track.
Ok, I learned the song. I need to prove it. Here it is-
If you want to tell us how you learned to play a song I want to run it. Shoot me an email and let’s learn from each other.
*turns out he plays with a pick half the time and his fingers half the time, but he’s playing this song with a pick live here. **
** I’m not judging pick vs fingers, we don’t do that here. Just pointing it out since it matters when you’re learning a song how the original player played it.
Doug Robertson is the editor of The Bass Blog, the blog component of The Bass Channel, your one stop YouTube channel for all things bass. His number one is a Mexican Geddy Lee Signature Jazz and his boomer is a BEAD tuned T-Bird. Find books by Doug here. If you’re interested in contributing to The Bass Blog please reach out to Doug at doug@thebasschannel.net. We would love to hear from you.
