Constructing A Walking Bass Line

[Music Playing] Okay, on today’s post, we are going to talk about constructing a walking baseline. There are the obvious things that I guess should always apply to any music that you are trying to learn. Good time, good sound, use your ears, trying to find the notes that you like the sound of. Listen to the music that you are trying to learn how to play. Listen to it, absorb it, just try to get a right feel for it. All those things aside, I am going to discuss like the theoretical aspects of it and the things you can try out to help you better understand where the notes that you might hearing on your instrument. First of all, it is really good to be able to visualize the scales or the chord that you are playing on when you are playing a walking baseline. And for that I recommend that you check on the previous post about visualizing the scales on our page videos before you check this one out. It will help this one make more sense. There are a couple of things that are really key in walking baselines. There is actually more than a couple about 4 or 5 things. First of all is landing on the root of the chord on beat 1 that is a very important thing. Secondly, you can land on other chord terms on beat 1. For example if it is an F7 chord, you can land on an F and that is the strongest sound on beat 1 or beat 3, but mainly beat 1 talking about here. You could land on 5th that is the second strongest tone in the F chord in the 7 chord. You can land on the 3rd or the 7th also of beat 1 and that will work as well. Now, most walking baselines I guess sound like very scaly. I guess in nature, most of the time. There are arpeggios involved but it is mostly scale sounding. It has like a smoothly walking from one chord to the next and there are different situations that you will come across walking baselines where you are going to have to walk a line. It could be over one chord or it could be one chord per measure that is very common, or two chords per measure. Those are the most common circumstances that you have to walk a baseline and think about something more than just playing the root. I guess you really could just play the root, but that sounds pretty boring and not very walking like. So, first of all I am going to try and run a scale over an F7 chord and see if that works as a walking baseline, so I am going to run down the scale 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4. [Bass Demonstration] It did not really sound -- it sounds kind of a walking bass line, but it is pretty monotonous. I am going to keep trying to do that and go back up the scale. [Bass Demonstration] That is basically it, but there are some things that make it really work. Try and land on beat 1 on the root of the chord on beat 1 like I said. But to enable you to do that, you can use other notes that are not in the scale. You can use a leading tone that is a half step above or below the note that you want to land on. For example, if you want to land on the root of the chord F, say this F, you could run down the scale and before we get to that F on beat 1, we can play an F#. Or you could play an E a half step below, so it will sound like this. [Bass demonstration] Well, if it is the same chord for more than two measures you can run down the scale. Add that leading tone just as I get to the F on the 3rd measure to make it work out right so. Great, that is one thing you can try. Also as I said previously, you can land on the 5th on beat 1 and that will sound strong, so the 5th of the chord C, leading tone. See how I use the leading tone to make the scale work out right so that I could land on a strong note on beat 1. [Bass Demonstration] Okay, also I could have used the leading tone from a half step below. Beat 3 is also kind of strong, so it is good to land on a chord tone on beat 3 sometimes too, and it gives a strong sound. For example instead of going -- [Bass demonstration] That does not sound bad, but you could also put a leading tone leading into the 7th of the chord so Eb here in the 7th of the F7 chord. You could go -- [Bass demonstration] See, that works also. So, leadi