Talking Technique: Beautiful Practice

This lesson is called “Beautiful Practice” for a reason. Our exercise this week creates a lush harmony and texture all while working out our theory and technique at the same time.

The theory portion of this week’s lesson is that we’ll be playing diatonic triads in open voicings. If that sounds foreign to you, don’t worry. We’ll be breaking down what that means to make it easy to understand. To play the etude, we have to do a lot of string jumping, which will build our technique.

It’s a great bass workout for your fingers, mind, and ears. What’s not to love?

Follow along with this transcription and the video below.

Austrian-gone-Californian Ariane Cap is a bassist, educator, blogger and author. In her book Music Theory for the Bass Player and corresponding 20-week online course, she teaches music theory, bass technique, bass line creation and fretboard fitness in a systematic, practical and experiential way. She just released a brand new course on ear training for the bass player: Ear Confidence - 6 Paths to Fearless Ears. Contact her via her blog or website.

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Leave a Reply to Rudy Cancel reply

  1. Rudy

    Excellent, thank you!

  2. Mike

    Thanks Ariane, that’s an inspiring excercise

  3. BB

    Amazing lesson. Love the delay. I have one myself and just got the timing setting as yours in the video. I could play this all day long. Thank you for a great practice tip!

  4. Zhuang

    Thanks, Ariane. It’s a very useful practice, and I enjoy doing it a lot.
    But I just wanted to say that I think there’s a mistake in the transcription. The E min in pattern six is not inverted.

    • Wolf

      you are correct. good observation. Thank you. The notation is correct on TAB and standard staff (matching what Ariane plays). The chord symbol is wrong. That said, Em/g would also work in this pattern.

  5. Joël

    Thank you so much!!