My name is Earnest Jackson and I am the guy behind this website. In addition to teaching I have been a professional bass player for the last 20 years and am the founder of Alliance Music Academy which is a music teaching studio in Plano, Texas.
My method for teaching is to help you to achieve your goals by meeting you where you are and then giving you a clear concise path to get to where you want to be.
I got the idea for the Volume 1 Series of books a few years after I had begun teaching private bass lessons. I read and tried every method book that I could find for the first few years.
I realized that although there were a lot of bass instruction books available none of them seemed to give the student a comprehensive and clear path for learning.
So out of that frustration I decided to write my own method book.
Here was my initial criteria for the books:
- To prepare a student for college
- Or prepare them for life as a professional bass player
- I also wanted the books to be flexible enough to help people of all different age and interest levels (from really serious players to hobbyist musicians).
Writing these books has been a labor of love for me. I originally wrote these in 2004 and have been using them for teaching, revising them, testing them… and improving them ever since.
I have taken my time to try different things with them and have finally settled on what I believe to be the best way to learn the bass in the Volume 1 Series.
Students have used the information in this series of books to get scholarships at prestigious music schools around the country (Berklee, USC, CalArts, & UNT to name a few). Others have went on to play in cover bands, cruise ships, to excel in their school music programs, or become a part of their church music team, and some of my students are professional musicians now making a living playing the bass!
Good instruction won’t just help you meet your goals… it will push you beyond them… and that is really what sparked the idea for these books and this website!
