Paul Wolfe Breaks Down Bassline Writing in New Book Deliberate Composition for Bass Guitar
Bass educator and Deliberate Practice author Paul Wolfe has released a new book called Deliberate Composition For Bass Guitar: The Secret Sauce: How To Create Your Own Basslines. The 101-page book builds a methodology for crafting your own bass lines.
“[It’s] a step by step process whereby you create good bass lines simply by working through a song bar-by-bar, identifying what the two-chord movement you’re working through is and then selecting a piece of vocabulary that will fit that two-chord movement and – provided it’s executed with an appropriate rhythm – do the three musical tasks that all good bass lines have to do,” Wolfe explains.
The process explains the Two-Chord Matrix (a blueprint for each chord progression), the five foundational chord progressions, how to compose a quarter note line and turn it into eighth notes, and how to create a 12-bar blues. Wolfe also expands your vocabulary by layering in “Connecting Devices and Modifying Devices.”
You can get an idea of how Wolfe’s method works with this video of how he uses Band in a box to compose bass lines.
Aside from advice on how to create your own bass lines, Wolfe includes 15 assignments in the book to bolster your chops.
Deliberate Composition For Bass Guitar: The Secret Sauce: How To Create Your Own Basslines is available now in paperback through Amazon.
In his time with No Treble, Kevin has met hundreds of amazing bassists and interviewed icons like Jack Casady, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Marcus Miller, and more. He's a gigging bassist performing jazz in Northern Virginia and bluegrass with The Plate Scrapers up and down the East Coast. Kevin appreciates all genres of music, from R&B to metal and everything in between. Connect with Kevin on Facebook and check his performance schedule on his website.
I have been an online student of Paul’s since around 2010. Since then, he has produced an online Encyclopedia of Bass and a bunch of excellent books backing up his unique approach to bass instruction. Instead of focusing on boring scales and theory, you learn that as you go. His approach is that you learn to play bass by learning how to play songs, which, as far as I know, is the main reason most of us picked up bass in the first place. Do yourself a favor and not only check out his books, but also have a look at his website how-to-play-bass.com for his unique teaching approach.