Bass Lessons

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.

Olivier Babaz is back with another “Bass & Creativity” lesson. He covers how we can progressively build chord changes, starting from a static modal section and adding modulations and harmonic movement to it while keeping a consistent groove.

One of the most common phrases spoken at a jam session is “it’s just a one, four, five!” Long story short, it’s a very helpful hint... if we know how to find our ones, fours, and fives.

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.

Today we feature another blues bass lesson with the classic Muddy Waters tune, “Got My Mojo Working.” We’ll follow a classic 12-bar blues progression and use a quintessential descending line for the turnaround at the end of the progression. This is definitely a must-know tune if you want to get into the blues.

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, Rich Brown is taking the ghost notes concept he talked about in a previous lesson, applying it to The Blues.

This “Keep It Groovy” lesson takes you through one of her favorite B.B. King shuffles, “Paying The Cost To Be The Boss.” This is known as a medium shuffle—not too fast and not too slow. It’s just right!

One of the most frequently asked questions Rich Brown gets has to do with his tone. So this week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, he shows us how he gets his tone. To prove the point, he grabbed his cheap Squier bass to demonstrate.

In this episode of “Keep It Groovy,” Ryan Madora features a funky bass line over a 12-bar blues progression. She uses the blues box pattern but adds a few grace notes for maximum funk.

By playing behind or in front of the beat, we’ll experiment with laid out or edgy time feels on a constant tempo. We’ll see how it affects tension and release of the chord changes, how the body expresses it, and how it helps build rhythmic awareness and agility in a band setting.

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, Rich Brown is talking about a subject he’s asked about frequently. Today, we’re talking about ghost notes - and how to improve your groove.

In this episode of “Keep It Groovy,” Ryan Madora shows us how to build a groove using the e minor pentatonic scale as our groove prompt. It can be extremely helpful to give yourself a starting point, both rhythmically and harmonically.