Walking Bass Lines: From the Beginning

What makes a good bass line? Bass lines are the single most important aspect of playing the bass, but creating a good bass line is always deceptively difficult. The biggest challenge we face when playing bass lines is being as clear as possible, but without being too boring or too obvious. In this course, we start from the beginning, giving you a complete recipe to create good bass lines on your own. Often, we bass players can get frustrated with our bass lines — even when we’re outlining the changes, it feels like something is missing. That’s because good bass lines aren’t just about outlining the changes. A good bass line has three components: clarity, voice leading, and register. If you play a bass line entirely in half position, you’ll get bored easily … you have to change register sometimes! If you play a bass line where every bar starts on the root of the chord, you’ll also get bored … you need some voice leading from one bar to the next! And if you play a bass line without really outlining the chords, you might … get fired! Walking Bass Lines: From the Beginning solves all of those challenges, giving you a clear start-to-finish recipe, complete with exercises and guidelines, for creating good bass lines in any situation.  

• Why bass lines are important
• What is “voice leading?”
• How to play a good bass line for multiple choruses
• When to start on the root, and when not to start on the root
• And more!