Bass Lessons - Page 25

How about some cool two octave triad fills for your grooves? Playing triads over two octaves is surprisingly difficult to do on the bass. Today we’ll cover how to not only master playing those triads over two octaves, but also how to build some cool fills from that tonal material. An important tip ensures that delivery is right. Be sure...

I’ve been wanting to do some Gospel episodes but wasn’t sure where I wanted to start until now. The first song that we’ll look art is the post-Civil War spiritual, “Oh Freedom”. In particular, I’m going to show you some ideas on how to “hear the changes” , an extended Gospel-style turnaround and how you might approach this song if...

Triads are three note chords that serve as the building blocks of functional harmony. As bass players, it’s important for us to recognize triads by ear and to know how to play them starting on each string in all keys and in all registers of the bass. We’ll focus on the major triad in this lesson to get your ears...

Playing with good time, develop sensitive dynamics, produce a solid tone and have the confidence to express interesting musical ideas on your bass is essential. It only makes common sense that developing a deeper bass guitar specific technical understanding and prowess is the essential path as an improvising bass player. In this lesson, we will cover some ground to gain...

This lesson is called “Beautiful Practice” for a reason. Our exercise this week creates a lush harmony and texture all while working out our theory and technique at the same time. The theory portion of this week’s lesson is that we’ll be playing diatonic triads in open voicings. If that sounds foreign to you, don’t worry. We’ll be breaking down...

I was back home in New Orleans recently hanging out with my mom and attending my @* year high school reunion. Where did that time go??? Yeah, that’s a tale for another time! While I was there I sat in with the Marc Stone band down on Frenchman at a club called 30/90. My buddy Thomas was the bass player...

Typically when we play scales, we play across the strings, but there’s a lot of value in playing all the way up a single string. It helps us to think in positions and to mentally know how many steps you are skipping as you walk up the string. Today we’ll be working on our theory as well as our technique...

“Amoreena” was Dee Murray’s first recording collaboration with Elton John, and from analyzing the transcription of his playing on this tune, it’s not hard to see why John and Murray had such a prolific career working together. Many different bassline approaches are employed to great affect in this song. The form of the bassline as a whole also demonstrates good...

When you’re playing fingerstyle, where do you put your right thumb? You can anchor it on the pickup, but that can limit your tonal range. You could anchor on the lower strings, but then where do you put it when you need to play those strings? That’s precisely the question we got from a reader, so today we’re examining the...

Rhythmic phrasing is an often overlooked subject in bass guitar education, much of it left to chance and feel. However, the bass guitarist should become “rhythmic aware” as being an integral part of the rhythm section of a band. In this lesson I explain how to use rhythm as motific building blocks to develop your ideas – enabling you to...

In this episode, we’ll continue to explore the Afro-Caribbean influence on the music that we know as Rock and Roll and R&B. I’m going to show you just a few ways that I use note length and some other “flavor packets” to spice up the 3:2 Clave and give it my own style and personality.  I’ve included some transcriptions of...

So you haven’t gotten to touch your bass in a while. It happens! We all have those times where we don’t get time with our bass for extended periods. When we get the bass in our hands again, our gut instinct is to get all our fast chops back, but that’s not such a great idea. The way to get...