Everything in music is relative. Don't take that as meaning "Hey, there are no rules, so forget all that theory stuff." The relationships between musical elements are what make music music and not just a collection of random notes. When you hang out at a friend's house, figuring out which one's his mother and which one's his kid sister is highly useful information when deciding when to put your feet on the table and when to say "ma'am". Survival skills, you understand.

Learning to read for the bass is straightforward (I won't say easy) when you focus on the elements which simplify the translation of dots into sounds and ignore those that complicate it. Complicating this lesson is that ActiveBass doesn't really support the display of standard notation, so it will be easier to follow along if you scrape up some bass clef manuscript samples of your own and write in the note names as we discuss them.

The act of reading music is two-faceted: reading rhythm and reading pitches. This lesson is about the latter, even though the former is more important musically, especially with such a groove-based instrument as the bass. (I haven't come up with a coherent way of teaching rhythm yet, so it will have to wait.)

The specific musical relationships we're going to focus on in this lesson are:

• comparing vertical location of notes on and around the bass clef and their position on the bass neck, establishing an overall "geography"
• comparing the abstract structure called the major scale (and its concrete incarnation, key signature) with its related movable "shape" on the fretboard, establishing a tactical approach to sightreading a bass line in a flowing way called "following the contour"

If you haven't learned the notes all over the neck yet, you'd best do that first. I humbly recommend my lesson on Learning The Neck Easily.