Bass Lessons

Ryan Madora is back with a new “Keep It Groovy” bass lesson. This one focuses on adding variety to eighth note grooves by adding rhythmic and tonal accents to pulsing eighth notes to provide shape and movement to an otherwise "root centric" line.

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, Rich Brown takes a look at a great way to practice when playing over the II-V-I chord progression. These tips and exercises open up the mind (and the fretboard).

Tim Fletcher’s and Troy Hughes’ epic project “Kansas: Leftoverture – The Complete Basslines” has reached its seventh chapter, featuring Dave Hope’s work on “Cheyenne Anthem”.

Ryan Madora’s new “Keep It Groovy” bass lesson is here, and it’s a follow-up to the previous one about pedaling vs. pulsing eighth notes. In this one, she shares a few ways to add accents and pizzazz to our bass line.

In this new “Bass & Creativity” lesson by Olivier Babaz, we explore two rhythmic directions for building new ideas in our solo phrasing. First up is managing the “one.” The second is examining our length of melodic fragments.

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.

In this new “Keep It Groovy” bass lesson, Ryan Madora is here to help you with varying eighth-note feels, to help you contribute to the overall feel of a song.

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, Rich Brown is staying with the Pentatonic Scale. This lesson will get you grooving and playing great fills using the three Pentatonic shapes he discussed in the previous lesson.

In this “Keep It Groovy” lesson, Ryan Madora offers suggestions on buying a bass. Purchasing an instrument can be stressful, but you can take some of the pressure off with these tips.

Tim Fletcher took on John Paul Jones’ bass line on Dusty Springfield’s “Ain’t No Sun Since You’ve Been Gone” for his latest bass transcription. Check out his excellent take on the history of the tune, as well as his transcription and analysis.

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, Rich Brown shares the mother of all pentatonic exercises. This one is going to be a workout, but it’ll be well worth it.

In today’s “Keep It Groovy” lesson, Ryan Madora focuses on an important element of improvisation: location jumping. The goal is to build a bass theme and identify other locations on the fretboard where we can easily play it.