Last night I went back over some of my more difficult charts (written out in "proper" octave transposed bass clef notes, not just chord symbols and slashes) for some of the tunes that the oldies band I'm playing with (bass guitar) is adding to the repertoire.
Some of these bass parts are about as difficult (at least for me) as some of these tuba solos typically assigned by college teachers, and having close to perfected them, I find that I backslide if I let them sit for a few days. I will eventually learn them
"learn": Rather than short-term perfecting, I will long-term perfect them.
I've been talking about re-stringing this five-string bass from typical b e a d g over to e a d g c, but I'm starting to appreciate the advantages of the low 5th string. It's not just to make gospel music-ish "fart sounds" below E flat or D. Rather, I can use the B string on the 5th or 7th or even 9th or higher fret and avoid jumping back down to first position to catch some low notes (in the same way that I was thinking of using a high C string to avoid jumping up to some high fret on the G string). I may just leave it this way. I suppose I'm starting to understand the advantage of a 6-string bass, but that's an awfully wide neck and (knowing how people think when exposed to certain visuals) I've always (a personal bias) tended to view people playing six-string basses as jackasses OTHER THAN (obviously) those who can truly play the holy hell out of them.
We added some non-Aretha (I'm not sure who) arrangement of R ES P E C T whereby the arrangement was in B, but the band leader dropped it to B-flat - for the sake of the trumpet licks (which defined that I had to do a lot of shifting whereas - in B - it was easier). With a low B string (playing it in B flat, now), I don't have to jump up the neck to play the funky bass pattern in E flat, but can drop the first note (E flat) of those particular measures down an octave to the B string and I can keep my hand in the same place.
I've also pulled out the Rochut book 1 Bordogni vocalizes and have been playing those on bass guitar, because those are going to pull a bass guitar player up around the 10th and 12th and 14th frets a lot, forcing me to be (and in keys such as D-flat major and E major as well as relative minors) more familiar with that part of the neck. I've been fooling around with hammer-ons and pull-offs playing those same vocalises, but I don't know if I'll make specific decisions on where to use them. Mostly, I'm just trying to use them to sight-read and to teach myself to read way ahead and to make shifting decisions on the fly.
Getting back into playing a stringed instrument again (after all these decades) thrusts me back into of all the pre-thinking that's required to play written down music (that which is a level - or a few levels - above the banal) - in order to avoid painting oneself in a corner.
In fact, they had 650+ in their repertoire when I joined, none of 'em written down. In fact, the band's made over 30 CDs in their 47 year existence, and won two Grammies! Most musical fun I've had in a very loooong time.
HO, HO, HO! Santa thinks you're funny!