Bass Lesson Archives - Page 5

There’s nothing like starting a song with a cool bass riff. “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith shines a light on the bass for sure! At the very top, we set the tone. To play this riff correctly and in time right out of the box is what it’s all about. How to approach learning something like this? Only playing the riff...

Our friend Stuart Clayton recently made the exciting announcement that he’s kicking off a year-long series entitled “Bass Lick of the Week.” Here’s the first entry in the series, focused on playing a funk groove with a pick. “Each week I’ll be uploading a new video where I demonstrate an original bass groove – with on-screen notation – then talk...

Continuing our series on increasing fingerboard knowledge, here’s the accompanying Minor Arpeggio Exercises to play all across the fingerboard. This is the same principle as the Major types. I’ve given you a number of variations to try, and you’ll see this gives you more options when playing over a minor chord type. As usual, practice everything slowly, paying partucular attention...

We have not one, but two lessons for you this month! In this lesson, I’ll talk you through major 7th, then 9th, ?11th and 13th arpeggios, which follows part one (“Triad Visualization”). I am a firm believer in learning these concepts in multiple ways/fingerings – it all goes to increase our overall knowledge of the fingerboard, and that’s a good...

In this lesson, we’ll take a deep dive inside the world of playing across the bar line. Equally as relevant for both your solo lines and your groove playing, we will cover how to play across the bar line by using “Time Signature Superimposition” that will take your phrasing to a whole new and exciting level. Follow along with this...

This challenging bass lesson highlights Creative Chordal Connections, enabling you to understand complex jazz concepts while revealing how learning to play chords on the bass will help you to hear different chord qualities with greater clarity and ease. Follow along with the transcription and the video below.

In this lesson, I’ve taken a pretty classic and fairly easy to play bass part from Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and given you a few examples of how to use that as a springboard for creating other bass lines around that core groove. This can be really useful when playing under multiple soloists on the same tune. It’s not always enough...

Rhythmic Displacement is a concept based on being able to hear and perform rhythmic patterns starting on different subdivisions of the beat. The new superimposed rhythm creates an interesting illusion with the lines you are playing, which in turn creates tension. This lesson is aimed at giving you usable ideas for improvising walking bass lines using the concept of Rhythmic...

Welcome back to the third installment of Creative Bass Lines. Before we start, I’d like to take a moment to say a fond farewell to the amazing Victor Bailey who sadly left us way too soon a few days ago. Victor was an enormous influence on me, and his highly melodic yet super funky playing made an indelible impression on...

In episode 22, we introduced a way of practicing scales that uses intervals rather than going up and down the scales themselves. We went over thirds, which gives you great materials for runs, fills, and solos. Someone asked in the comments if I could give some examples of how to use the material in a chord progression, so that’s what...

Here we have the second installment of the Creative Bass Lines, and this month, it’s “Bass Gruv”. For this we’re looking at a Headhunters-esque bass groove I wrote. This would fit the harmony of an E dominant 7th chord, or for a crunchier sound, try setting up a vamp with an E7?9, too. I wanted to introduce some of you...

Everyone loves a perfectly placed fill. That’s why today we’ll be going over scalar exercises that will help us create those tasty licks while beefing up our technique. In essence, we’re practicing a scale. Typically when you play a scale, you go from root to root in order. But we’re going to break it down and move in thirds instead!...