The hardest thing for me, is to actually hear the lower notes on the bass when I'm tuning it. I learned how to play music on a violin, so my ears were definitely biased as to what they wanted to hear. Despite the fact that I have been playing trombone for quite some years, it is always difficult for me to hear the lower register.

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So what do I do now so i can be sure my bass is in Tune?

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The more I play the bass, the better I am able to hear if it's in tune or not, but before I came to this a friend showed me harmonic tuning. This is where you tune your instrument using basic physical laws of wave motions. Sounds complicated, huh? It's not. If you're like me, too poor to buy a tuner, and can't hear the lower register very well, this is the best to tune.

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First you play the harmonic at the fifth fret on the E string. To do this you just lightly place your finger on the string without pressing down, just over the fret. Then play the E string. What you get is a harmonic, and you can remove the finger on your left hand, and this note will continue to sound. Next you play the harmonic on the seventh fret of the A string. What you'll notice is that the note should be the same.

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From here what you listen for is a series of beats, it will kinda sound like the volume of that note is being played around with, going up and down in a regular fashion. What you want to do then is to adjust the tuner for the A string so that you can't hear the beats any more, this means that the string is either really out of tune(you should be able to hear it), or in perfect tune.

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You can continue with the same pattern of playing harmonics to tune the D and G strings...just play the harmonic at the 5th fret on the sting just below that which you will tune, and the harmonic at the 7th fret of the one you will be tuning. I usually go in the order E tunes A, A tunes D, D tunes G.

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This way you can have notes to tune that are in pretty much everyone's audible range. Also, if you noted you can take you hand off the fretboard completely, and that note will continue to ring(laws of physics), so you can tune and listen at the same time, unlike the other type of relative tuning.