Scales Archives

Master bass scale practice by turning scales into real music. Build lines, grooves, and fills while improving your technique and unlocking the full fretboard.

Practice scales with a Flea-inspired twist using rhythmic phrasing from "Around the World" to add groove, precision, and creativity to your bass lines.

For any beginner or intermediate bass player getting into music theory, understanding intervals is one of the basics that should be covered. This lesson breaks it down while keeping it groovy.

This bass lesson is here to get you working through the key of E. We’ll dig into two-octave E Major and E minor scales so that you can feel confident working through the most comfortable key on the bass.

This bass lesson features a quick technique exercise that can seriously help your mobility on the bass. It’s about developing the adjacent string toggle, or the ability to quickly play the same fret on two strings that are next to one another.

In today’s “Keep It Groovy” lesson, Ryan Madora goes over two popular major scale shapes and a great way to connect them to play over two octaves. Ryan focuses on what she calls the “4-fret span” and “5-fret span” shapes.

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, Rich Brown has a great scale exercise to help you with melody and rhythmic phrasing. This exercise is based on a simple concept that can be applied to any scale.

This week in The Brown'stone on No Treble, Rich Brown takes an in-depth look at major scales and how to play them in ways you might not have considered before. This lesson could be a real eye-opener.

This week in The Brown’stone, Rich Brown takes us through one of his favorite sequential patterns to play on major and minor scales. He loves this exercise because it’s so beautifully melodic and can easily be applied to any musical situation.

Three-note-per-string patterns offer a lot of opportunities for lightning-fast licks. In this episode of Talking Technique, Ari shows us how to get started with the idea of them by practicing a scale all across the bass in speed lick fashion.

In this video, we’ll work through a great pattern that I learned from the great trombonist Dave Glen. It’s a fantastic way to make the transition between scales and arpeggios and also helps you to relate them more naturally to different chord types. I found this very useful when I first heard Dave talking about it and I think you...

We’re continuing our exercise series this week with a lesson on modal arpeggio patterns. Learning modes, scales, and patterns help to open the fretboard up in your mind. You learn the connections, intervals, and relationships of the notes. Some of this sounds more complicated than it is. Hang in there and we will work it all out.