Bass Line Writing

This is the first video in a series of lessons looking at the basics of bass fills. We’re going to be looking at a simple and common four bar chord progression and working through several bass fills on the final bar of A7. Bass Fill Basics You can insert fills wherever you like in a…

In this lesson we’re going to look at a killer funky bass riff and then break it down to see what it’s made of and how we can apply those building blocks in our own basslines. The main concepts we’ll be covering are chord tones and chromatic approach Killer Funky Bass Riff  One of the…

In this weeks lesson I’ll be looking at the common double note octave lines you might hear in loads of different disco songs. Double Notes A common technique in disco bass is to double the second note in an octave pattern. This gives us an eighth note followed by a sixteenth. The fingers you use…

Recently I’ve had a few requests for lessons on bass runs. So here are a few simple examples to get you started Simple Pentatonic Bass Runs The term ‘bass run’ covers a pretty wide range of stuff, so we are going to concentrate on runs that act as simple fills. That doesn’t mean however that…

In this lesson I’ll be expanding on the previous ‘Funky Bass Line’ lesson by showing you how we can add scale notes into our riff. Recap Last lesson, we created a bass groove by doubling the kick drum pattern and used the notes of a D7 chord. We are going to expand on that groove…

This lesson expands on the 12 bar blues topic by moving into a blues rock style and looking at how we can create some fills using chord tones, scales and chromatic notes. Twelve-Bar Blues The previous lesson, Beginner Blues Bass, explored a common chord sequence called the twelve-bar blues. As we mentioned, there are a…