Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

Tags: arpeggiosdominant1 3 5 6basslines for guitarsecret guitar teachersecretbluesguitarsixthbassbasslinesnick minnionteacher12-barseventhsecretguitarteacherbass guitarbasslines from arpeggios

Description: Please go to secretguitarteacher.com for more information. Here is the abridged transcript of this video: Continuing with this mini-series on a simple approach to playing Bass guitar, let’s look at some arpeggio-based blues, bassline patterns. In the last lesson we looked at this commonly used pattern, which I described as 1 3 5 6. Because it uses the notes 1 3 5 and 6 from the major scale of the root note of the chord.; These notes come straight out of a Major sixth arpeggio. Now I think it’s a good question to ask: Why use the notes from a major sixth to support a Seventh chord? And the answer is that harmonies generally sound richer when they contain a bit of contrast. Say I am strumming an A7 like this …over me playing a bass line that uses only the same notes as the chord contains…In this case 1 3 5 b7 …you can hear that it works OK, but it is almost too good a fit – the sound lacks a bit of body because we are effectively both playing the same bunch of notes.….But if I switch to playing the 1 3 5 6 bassline I introduce a slight contrast between what we are hearing from the bass and what we are hearing from the acoustic guitar… as a result, I think you will agree that the sound has just a bit more structural strength to it. When you study music theory, one of the things you learn is just which notes you can mix together in this way and which ones you can’t. But of all the notes, the sixth is probably the one that is the easiest to add to a chord without altering its tonality or functionality. So, this makes the Major 6th arpeggio a very versatile source of bass lines in most forms of music. Here are a few ways we can string these notes together to make basslines that you commonly hear in blues tunes. One option is to leave the third out altogether so instead of 1 3 5 6 we can play 1 5 6 5. Or we might reverse the order of notes and play 1 5 3 6 Or we can keep the order the same and alter the rhythm 1 3 5 6 double up the notes, repeat pairs of notes … and generally mess around with it! There are endless possible ways to use this notes. So, why not pause the video and have a little go at that yourself – see what you come up with? Now as well as using the major sixth arpeggio as a basis for a line supporting a dominant seventh chord, we can also simply add the sixth note to the dominant seventh arpeggio and this gives us one of the best known two-bar basslines 1 3 5 6 b7 6 5 3 The only thing to look out for here is that, being a two-bar bassline, we have to modify it when we come to the first two bars of the last line where we usually change chords each bar … So, over the first line I can use the 2-bar long bassline twice then as we move up to the D7 chord in line two I can simply play the same line based on the D root note and then back to the A root for the two bars of A7. But then you can see we have just one bar of E7 so we can’t play a two-bar long riff over that. The simplest trick is to play the first half of the line – 1 3 5 6 over that bar then take that same riff down to the D root …Before returning to the two-bar bassline over the A7. A slightly harder to play, but I think, more interesting sounding solution, is to split the two-bar bassline between the two chords E7 and D7 like this playing 1 3 5 6 rooted on the E note and then finding the b7 relative to the D root and coming back down the bassline playing the 6th 5th and 3rd notes relative to the D root So my last line sound like this… There are of course other solutions and experimenting with different approaches using your ears to judge the result is what I recommend to help you develop a good feel for this element of bass playing. I’ll leave you to experiment with these ideas for now. Let me know what you come up with. Next lesson in this series, we’ll take a look at using the octave as a framework for blues basslines. See you then!