For the bass player who can play songs — and is ready to start understanding what they're actually doing
A complete 100-lesson journey through all areas of creativity on bass — from building your first original grooves and riffs all the way through to melodic playing and solo improvisation. With the musical vocabulary to play freely, in any situation, at any level.
5.0 stars from verified students on the TalkingBass store. Taught by Mark Smith to 451,000+ subscribers on YouTube.
$240
$168
One-time payment · Lifetime access
That's 30% off the usual $240. When the sale closes, the full price of The Creative Bassist rises permanently to $320. This isn't a temporary discount coming to an end. It's a permanent price increase.
$168 is the cheapest this course will ever be.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
"Perhaps the only course you'll ever need after developing fundamental technique on bass. Covers theory, rhythm, chord tones, progressions, melodic ideas, ear training — all beginner friendly while helping you shape your sound. Mark's lessons have always been fantastic but this may be his magnum opus."
— Mike Popplewell, USA · Verified Owner
You can play songs. You've learned some riffs, maybe worked through a few lessons, picked things up from YouTube. You're not a complete beginner.
But there's a gap between playing what you've been taught and actually creating something — and nobody's ever shown you how to cross it. When someone asks you to just play something, or the music starts moving and you need to make a decision, the hands freeze.
"Every week someone asks me some version of the same question: 'I can play the songs, but when it comes to creating something of my own, I just freeze.' I heard it enough times that I knew exactly what course I needed to build." — Mark Smith
You sit down with the bass, and instead of running through the same songs you already know, something different happens. You start building a groove from scratch. You hear a chord change and you know which notes will work over it. You add a fill that actually fits — not because you've memorised it, but because you understand why it works. That's what a musical vocabulary gives you. And that's what this course is built to develop.
Not hunting for the right note — building grooves that work over chord progressions, in any style, with your own rhythmic and melodic choices.
Not just copying shapes and patterns — you know what notes are in the chord, why a bass line works, and how to make musical decisions rather than just guessing.
Not memorised tricks that land wrong — musical fills built from real understanding of rhythm, timing, and harmony, that fit the song and the moment.
Vibrato, slides, bends, legato phrasing — the expressive techniques that turn a string of notes into something musical and genuinely yours.
From your first original groove all the way through to melodic playing and improvisation — a complete roadmap, built one step at a time, so you always know what to work on next.
No more living in the first four frets. You know where you are anywhere on the neck — and you can create from any position without getting lost.
Here's the problem with how most bass players learn creativity: they look for licks. They memorise fills. They find patterns and copy them. And it feels like progress, until they're in a real musical situation and none of it works — because copying isn't the same as creating.
The difference is vocabulary. Just as a child learns to speak by absorbing words and combining them into sentences, a musician develops a creative voice by absorbing musical ideas and learning to combine them in real time.
The conventional approach
How The Course Works
Every great bass line starts with rhythm. The course begins by building your feel for the grid — understanding how rhythm creates tension and release — before a single note of melody is introduced. This is the foundation most courses skip entirely.
Every concept in this course is applied immediately to real musical contexts — jam tracks, progressions, actual bass line creation — so the vocabulary sticks because it's been used, not just understood.
One of the most powerful tools in the course is deliberate restriction — limiting yourself to one string, one position, one chord tone — and creating within that constraint. This forces real creativity and unlocks the whole fretboard faster than any scale exercise.
Most players treat bass line creation and soloing as completely separate skills. This course treats them as a continuum: the musical vocabulary you build in Volume 1 is the exact foundation you use to solo in Volume 2. Everything connects, and nothing is wasted.
Introducing
100 lessons across two complete volumes — from building your first original grooves to melodic playing and solo improvisation. Over 20 hours of video, plus backing tracks, PDF workbook, and more.
"I get messages every week from bass players who've learned songs, worked through lessons, maybe picked up some theory from YouTube — but the moment they try to create something of their own, they hit a wall. They can play what they've been shown. They can't make anything themselves.
That's the problem this course is built to solve. Everything in it — every lesson, every jam track, every exercise — is in service of one goal: developing a real creative voice on the instrument. Not theory for theory's sake. Not licks to memorise. A genuine musical vocabulary, built step by step.
Both volumes are included in one purchase. No upsell needed."
— Mark Smith
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
Module 1 · 15 Lessons
Where creativity begins — not with scales, but with rhythm. You'll build your first bass lines using the rhythmic grid system: a framework for understanding how grooves work and how to construct them from scratch. You'll learn what it means to lock in with a drummer, how to develop tone and touch, and why building a musical vocabulary matters more than memorising licks.
Module 2 · 21 Lessons
Where harmony meets creativity. You'll learn how intervals, chord tones, and scales work — not as abstract theory, but as practical tools for building bass lines that outline the music. You'll unlock the fretboard by learning multiple positions, understand how keys and progressions work, and begin applying chord scales and modes. Everything introduced in a musical context, so the theory sounds good from lesson one.
Module 3 · 16 Lessons
Riff writing in depth — the elements of a catchy riff, how to use rhythmic tension and release, how to work in the higher register for drama. You'll move into blues (twelve-bar, minor blues, 12/8), walking bass, and inversions before finishing with pentatonics as both a riffing and fill-building tool. By the end you'll have a toolkit for creating fills that genuinely fit the music.
Module 4 · 15 Lessons
Volume 2 opens by expanding the creative tools from Volume 1 through deliberate restriction — limiting yourself to specific fretboard areas or note sets to force real creativity and develop genuine fluency. You'll work through scale, chord tone, chromatic, and pentatonic restrictions across the whole neck. Then add anacrusis, anticipation, odd time signatures, and both scalar and arpeggio sequencing.
Module 5 · 13 Lessons
Something most bass courses never touch: how to play melodies expressively. Not just which notes to play, but how to make them sing — through register, fretting choices, tonal personality, and a full set of expressive techniques. Vibrato, slides, bends, legato phrasing, dynamic expression. You'll learn to analyse a melody and understand how it relates to harmony — the crucial bridge into real improvisation.
Module 6 · 20 Lessons
What most bass players think of as out of reach — it isn't, if you have the right foundation. You'll construct solos from phrases rather than patterns, develop solo vocabulary through transcription, and work systematically through chord tone soloing, seventh chord application, melodic runs, soloing through changes, pentatonic improvisation, chromatic phrases, and blues soloing. Clear, progressive, and genuinely achievable.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
The complete written companion to both volumes — all lesson material, notation, tab, and reference exercises. Keep it beside your bass. Come back to it during practice, reference it later. The kind of material you'll still be using years from now.
Every lesson that calls for a backing track comes with one. Professionally recorded, real instruments, built to practise the concept at hand. The general practice tracks go beyond the course lessons so you can keep developing your vocabulary long after you've finished.
The members site tracks your progress through every lesson. You can pick up exactly where you left off, mark individual lessons complete, and always see how far you've come. The difference between a course you finish and one you abandon halfway through.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
5.0 average · 8 verified reviews
"Perhaps the only course you'll ever need after developing fundamental technique on bass. Covers theory, rhythm, chord tones, progressions, melodic ideas, ear training — all beginner friendly while helping you shape your sound. Mark's lessons have always been fantastic but this may be his magnum opus."
"Mark has already put his finger on my biggest failing — rhythm. I can play all my scales, pentatonics, triads and inversions, and am fairly fluent across the fretboard. But I just can't seem to turn those skills into actual music. This is the only course of its kind I have come across that addresses rhythm from the outset. The grid concept has clarified this greatly for me. Well worth the money."
"Excellent course! I am halfway through Volume 1 and I see more and more the bigger picture of making bass lines. I used to make my own bass lines, but they were not always very good or interesting. This course will surely help me in being more creative. And also in composing overall. Thank you very much, Mark!"
"I have just started this course but it has solved my biggest problem — time and groove. Once again Mark has made this a simple and understandable learning journey. I have tried the rest — but just go with the best!"
"I have taken several of Mark's courses — all excellent. My favourites are Chord Tone Essentials and Scale Essentials. I consider The Creative Bassist a Master Class in how to apply what was so well taught in those courses. I am only on Lesson 6 but I am highly pleased. This is the first course where I have downloaded and printed the course materials. Great job Mark!"
"Teaching style works great for me. Very impressive — this will give more room for improvement."
"Mark's excellent stripped-back presentational style with plain backgrounds and no distractions makes it easier to concentrate on what he is trying to teach. I am looking forward to working through the rest of this course. Well worth the money — thanks Mark."
Just try it. If it's not for you, you get every penny back.
Take a full 30 days to work through the lessons and play with the jam tracks. If you don't feel your playing developing — if the course isn't giving you something real to work on every time you pick up the bass — just email me and you'll get a full refund. No questions, no forms to fill in, no friction. I've been teaching bass online since 2013, and there is an incredibly low refund rate. Not because I make it hard to get your money back — because the course delivers what it says.
"This isn't the fast track — there isn't one. But this is the most direct path I know to becoming a creative bassist: someone who doesn't just play music, but makes it."
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
This is a lesson from Module 3 of Volume 1 — working with slash chords and inversions to create suspended and extended chord feels. A good example of how the course approaches harmony: always in a real musical context, always immediately applied.
Honest answers, no spin.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
I'm a bassist and educator from Yorkshire, England. I've been teaching bass online at TalkingBass since 2013. The channel sits at 451,000 subscribers now, and the question I get asked most — by far — is some version of: "How do I actually create something of my own?"
I built this course because I kept seeing the same gap. Players who'd put in years of work — learning songs, studying technique, even doing theory — but who'd never been taught how to combine any of it into something they'd made themselves. The creative side of bass playing doesn't get taught, because most courses focus on what to play, not how to create.
The Creative Bassist is the answer to that question — built from the ground up around developing a real musical vocabulary, in a way that connects directly to playing. Not theory for theory's sake. Not licks to memorise. A genuine creative voice, developed step by step.
There is an incredibly low refund rate. The 30-day guarantee is there regardless — try it properly, and make up your own mind.
Everything below is included in a single one-time payment. No subscriptions, no recurring fees — just lifetime access to the full course and everything that comes with it.
The Creative Bassist includes:
$240
$168
One-time payment · Lifetime access · 30-day money-back guarantee
That's 30% off the usual $240. When the sale closes, the full price of The Creative Bassist rises permanently to $320. This isn't a temporary discount coming to an end. It's a permanent price increase.
$168 is the cheapest this course will ever be.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Instant Access
That's The Creative Bassist — 100 lessons from building your first original grooves all the way through to melodic playing and improvisation, built around developing a real musical vocabulary you can use anywhere. If that sounds like what you've been looking for, the link's right there.
