Best of 2018: The Top 10 Bass Lessons & Transcriptions
Our Bass Lessons and Transcriptions are some of the most popular content we share. Here are your top 10 favorites from those categories for 2018. Time to hit the shed!
1. Talking Technique: Optimize Your Octaves with a Killer Bass Riff
Here is a cool modern retro disco funk riff that will help you optimize your octaves. A cool slide in the middle inspires more ideas for creative explorations and technique shedding…
2. New Year’s Resolutions for Bass: 5 Ingredients to Get You Results
Ari ran a survey just before the new year asking bass players what they struggled with the most. With an overwhelming majority, the response had to do with practicing. Check out the most common issues, and Ari’s advice for tackling them…
3. Creative Bass Lines: Using the Melodic Minor Scale To Navigate on a Minor ii-V-i Chord Progression
In this edition of “Creative Bass Lines” Rufus dives further into jazz-related harmony with a look at starting to get inside two of the most useful modes from the melodic minor scale…
4. Talking Technique: Short-Scale Bass Shedding
Short-scale basses have recently enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. In this episode, we’ll explore some right-hand, left-hand, and coordination drills that will help you wrap your mind around the shorter scale…
5. Bass Transcription: Anthony Jackson’s Bass Line on Michel Camilo’s “We Three”
Anthony Jackson is one of the most versatile bass players in the music scene and a real innovator in the 6-string bass (or contrabass guitar) that he developed in the seventies. Marcelo Cordova shares his transcription and analysis of Jackson’s bass line on Michel Camilo’s “We Three”…
6. Bass Transcription: Noel Redding’s Bass Line on “Come On (Part One)” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Fifty years ago, on the 27th August 1968, The Jimi Hendrix Experience entered New York’s Record Plant studio for the final session on Electric Ladyland. This album was to be perhaps Hendrix’s greatest artistic achievement, but it was also the catalyst for the breakup of the band. Tim Fletcher shares this transcription and analysis on Noel Redding’s Bass Line on “Come On (Part One)”…
7. Bass Transcription: Horace Panter’s Bass Line on “Ghost Town” by The Specials
Tim Fletcher’s series of transcriptions of the work of unsung British bassists was a very popular one. In this, the 9th entry, he takes on Horace Panter’s Bass Line on “Ghost Town” by The Specials…
8. Talking Technique: Alberti Bass
Do you know what an “Alberti Bass” is? If you play electric bass (rather than cembalo in the 1700’s), you are excused if you don’t. In this lesson, we’ll go over these Alberti inspired figures over the diatonic cycle, namely the A section of “Autumn Leaves”…
9. Talking Technique: Thinking Inside the Box – Upper Structure Pentatonics
This episode is all about thinking inside the box. Pentatonic box shapes only on the G and D string are easy to finger and make for quite the pizzazz when you lay them over a variety of chords…
10. Bass Transcription Analysis: Getting Inside Cannonball Adderley’s C7 Lick
In our last series of lessons, we had a look at a chorus of a Bob Mintzer blues over four episodes. Well, today we are putting just two bars of music under the microscope. This line is from a Cannonball Adderley solo on a tune called “Limehouse Blues”…
