For The Bass Player Who Has The Basics — And Is Ready To REALLY Play
If you've been practising every day and still feel stuck, it's not effort you're missing — it's the right material in the right order. Instead of scales and disconnected exercises, you'll learn through real, playable bass lines that get harder one step at a time.
5.0 stars from 40+ verified students on the TalkingBass store. Taught by Mark Smith to 451,000+ subscribers on YouTube.
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Groove Trainer gives you a clear, progressive set of original bass lines to work through — each one a focused lesson in technique, rhythm, and harmony at the same time. No guesswork. No random exercises. No tabs that turn out to be wrong.
That's what develops your technique, your feel, and your musical instincts all at the same time. And it's what keeps you coming back to practice. The problem is finding the right ones.
Songs are either too easy or too hard. The tabs you find online are often just plain wrong. Working things out by ear can take a looong time. And most of what's available at beginner-intermediate level is random. No logic to the order. No thread connecting one piece to the next.
You've probably tried:
"Finding a progressive set of bass lines to practise at the right level, in the right order, has always been almost impossible. So I decided to build one."
You sit down, pick up the bass, and you know exactly what you're working on. A focused, manageable groove two to sixteen bars in length, written specifically for your level. You learn it, understand it, play it over the backing track until it locks in. Then you move to the next one. Every session builds on the last.
Over weeks and months, your technique tightens, your timing improves, your theory knowledge grows. And all of it happened through playing real music, not grinding through exercises.
Every groove is an etude — written to develop specific technical skills in a specific order. Note control, position shifting, ghost notes, slides. Built in groove by groove, without a single isolated exercise.
From whole notes to syncopated 16th note funk, every rhythmic concept is introduced progressively and immediately applied to a real bass line. You don't just know the theory — you've played it.
Every groove comes with harmonic analysis. You know which chord you're playing over and which notes you're using — and why. You stop guessing and start hearing.
Two dedicated lessons on the drum kit and the bass-drum connection, then built into every groove across both volumes. Not just playing along to a track. Actually understanding how your bass locks in with the kick, snare, and hi-hat.
120 grooves in the right order means you never open your case and wonder what to work on. There's a clear next step — every single time you sit down.
Even the most complex bass lines are built from smaller building blocks — riffs, phrases, chord movements. Master those building blocks, and everything else becomes learnable.
The building block principle.Every complex bass line — every Jaco line, every Rocco Prestia funk groove, every James Jamerson Motown part — is made of shorter phrases repeated, developed, and combined. Groove Trainer breaks that down to its core: 120 original grooves, two to sixteen bars each, written to be learned quickly so you can focus on what actually matters. The technique details. The rhythmic feel. The harmonic content.
No guesswork — every groove has a coaching lesson.Every one of the 120 grooves comes with a dedicated video from Mark — breaking down the notes, the fingering, the technique, the rhythm, and the harmony. You're never left wondering if you're playing it right, whether the tab is accurate, or what a passage is supposed to feel like.
The bass-drum connection — the part most courses skip.One of the biggest things separating a locked-in bass player from one who's just playing notes is understanding how the bass relates to the drum kit. Groove Trainer dedicates two full lessons to this and builds it into every groove. It's consistently the thing reviewers say surprised them most.
Progressive from day one to Jaco.Volume 1 opens with whole-note lines at slow tempos. Volume 2 closes with syncopated 16th note funk in the style of Rocco Prestia and Jaco Pastorius. The distance between those two points is the course. Every step is deliberate.
The single most consistent thing I hear back from players who work through this is: "I just wish I'd done this earlier." That's what happens when you learn through real music in the right order, rather than hoping it comes together eventually.
Introducing...
120 original progressive grooves. Two complete volumes. The clearest path from beginner-intermediate to advanced — through real music, not exercises.
"I built Groove Trainer because there was a gap I kept seeing. Players who wanted to develop but couldn't find the right material at the right level in the right order. The answer was etudes — 120 original bass grooves, each one a complete lesson in technique, rhythm, and harmony at the same time."
Both volumes in a single purchase. No separate buys, no drop-off halfway through. The complete journey — from your first proper groove to syncopated Jaco-style funk. Every lesson is bite-sized. Fifteen or twenty minutes and you'll have something real to show for it.
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Module 1 — 18 Lessons
Before the grooves, the foundations. We cover what groove actually is — rhythmic feel, harmonic context, the relationship between bass and the band. Then the technique essentials: hand position, home position, note control, note duration, note register and positioning. From there: rhythm from the ground up — whole notes through to 8th notes, ties and rests — all as playing material. Then harmony: chord symbols, intervals, triads, seventh chords, chords of the major and minor keys. And two lessons most bass courses skip entirely — a complete introduction to the drum kit, and a dedicated lesson on how the bass and drums actually lock together.
Value: $50Module 2 — 60 Grooves
Sixty original grooves, starting with simple whole-note lines at slow tempos and working through to syncopated 8th note grooves. Every groove has a coaching video, four backing mixes, sheet music, and tab. Every groove includes harmonic analysis. Styles range from slow rock ballads, blues, country, and pop through to latin. Don't skip the early grooves because they seem simple — the first few whole-note lines are where note control and feel get built, and those things matter more than most players realise.
Value: $50Module 1 — 13 Lessons
Volume 2 expands everything from Vol 1 into more advanced territory. Rhythmically: 16th notes, 16th note rests and ties, ghost notes, slides, triplets, swing, compound time (6/8 and 12/8), and cut time. Harmonically: cadences, secondary dominant chords, modes, and modal harmony. Every one of these concepts features directly in the grooves of Module 2 — so you're learning it because it's in the music you're about to play, not as theory for its own sake.
Value: $50Module 2 — 60 Grooves
The sixty grooves of Volume 2 begin with swing and shuffle blues lines and work through rock, latin, disco, and funk across multiple time signatures. The final grooves are syncopated 16th note lines in the style of Rocco Prestia and Jaco Pastorius. If you've come through Vol 1 you'll feel the step up immediately — these are harder lines, more demanding rhythmically, more sophisticated harmonically. But the progression is still logical. Every groove builds on the one before it.
Value: $50Four modules plus the workbook and 480 backing tracks — a combined value of $375.
Yours today for $160.
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The complete written companion to both volumes — all lesson material, notation, tab, and harmony analysis for every groove. Keep it beside your bass. Come back to it during practice, reference it later. This is the kind of material you'll still be using years from now.
Value: $35Every groove comes with four separate full-band mixes: Complete Band, Band Without Bass, Drums and Bass, and Drums Only. Play along with the full arrangement, drop the bass out and take its place, lock in with just the rhythm section, or groove against the kit alone. That's 480 tracks across all 120 grooves. Loop them, play at the written tempo, go slower or faster. They'll fuel your practice for years — and they're yours to keep.
Value: $80The course tracks every lesson you've completed and picks back up exactly where you left off. With 120 grooves across two volumes, that's not a small thing. The difference between finishing a course and abandoning it three weeks in is often just knowing where you are.
Value: InvaluableGroove Trainer For Bass Guitar includes:
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40+ verified student reviews — 5.0 stars
"Apart from getting all the basics down. This might be the best course I've ever purchased."
"The real power of this course is Mark showing us how to lock in with the different components of the drum kit. Sure, other courses give you a drum track — but Mark is basically giving us some basic drum lessons and while doing so, improving our ear."
"I just wish I had had the opportunity to do a course like this earlier on in my bass-learning journey. Whether you are a beginner or improver, this course is highly recommended."
"I thought it might be too easy. What this showed me were the huge potholes in my bass playing. The lines start off easy and develop as you go along. By repetition it's building into me the basics of just holding down a groove — which I was obviously lacking."
"This is possibly the best course I've done anywhere on the net (and I've done a few!). Starts with a quick crash course of all the key music theory, then puts it into practice with small and increasingly difficult riffs and grooves — while explaining how the groove is created, what you're doing theory-wise, and how best to implement technique."
"It combines building technical skills with a 100% link to grooves in a band. This is exactly the situation most of us are longing for. Mark's way of explaining things matches my way of thinking."
"This course has been truly beneficial to my bass skills. Mark is very thorough and really goes into a lot of areas I was secretly avoiding. But now I have a much better understanding of music in general."
"There is a steep learning curve between Modules 1 and 2, but as you continue to knock out each groove, you'll feel yourself able to tackle other songs more easily and diversifying your technique. The basslines covered are from a variety of genres which makes it more interesting for bass players of all backgrounds."
"It took me a while to finish this course. There's a ton of content! Afterwards, I went back through it and reviewed everything one more time. The grooves that I found difficult to play the first time were much easier the second time round. I see that as progress. I would definitely recommend this as a good starting point after the beginners course."
Try it. If it's not for you, you get every penny back.
Take a full 30 days to work through the lessons and play the grooves. If you don't feel your playing developing — if the course isn't giving you something real to work on every time you pick up the bass — just email me and you'll get a full refund. No questions, no forms to fill in, no friction.
This isn't the fast track. There isn't one. But this is the most direct path I know to becoming a better bass player — through the thing you became a bass player to do in the first place.
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Honest answers, no spin.
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I'm a bassist and teacher from Yorkshire, England. I've been teaching bass online at TalkingBass since 2013. The channel is at 451,000 subscribers now, with a few thousand emails a year from players asking pretty much the same question in different words: I'm practising but not improving. What am I doing wrong?
My view on learning bass has always been the same: play real music. Songs, riffs, bass lines — from as early as possible. That's what develops technique, feel, and musicality at the same time. Scales and exercises have their place, but they're not where the development happens for most players.
The problem was that finding the right music at the right level — in the right order — was almost impossible. So I built it. 120 original grooves, two volumes, one clear roadmap. No guesswork. No wrong tabs. Just the most direct path I know to becoming the bass player you want to be.
Groove Trainer For Bass Guitar includes:
One-time payment · Lifetime access
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
That's Groove Trainer. 120 grooves, bite-sized lessons, built up from the absolute basics all the way to advanced funk. If it sounds like what you've been looking for — the link's right there.
