Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

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Description: Using a classic 8 bar blues tune, Nick demonstrates how to put into practice chromatic bass note linking. Find hundreds more lessons, videos and tutorials at the Secret Guitar Teacher site! Sign up now for a free 30 day trial secretguitarteacher.com -- Abridged Script: Following on from the last lesson in this mini-series, where we talked about separating out the bass notes from your chords, I thought we would take a closer look today at what I call chromatic bass note linking. Here’s my version of a classic 8 bar blues tune to demonstrate how this can work in the context of a song. First step is to just strum through the chord changes and get familiar with them. If you don’t already know this song, here are the chords. Once you have learned the chord sequence and are happy strumming through it, have a go at separating out the bass notes as shown in the last lesson. Now, to demonstrate what I mean by chromatic bass note linking, let’s home in on the change from the Dm in bar 4 to F in bar 5. If we look at where the root notes of these two chords are on the fret board, we can immediately see that they are nice and close to each other. And this is what presents us with a chromatic linking opportunity. We can simply fill in the steps of the chromatic scale between the root notes like this. In this case the 12/8 rhythm of the song means that we can place the linking notes on the beats 4 & a 1. To get the speed and fluency I need for this, notice that I am alternating my picking direction. Now it’s important to spot that we have already used up the first beat of the 5th bar with the F bass note… 4 & a 1… so we only have time for one strum of the F chord on the second main beat of the bar before we have to change to the D7. Now, once again, please take some time to practice this and work out the exact timing for yourself, before moving on. Our next chromatic bass-linking opportunity comes in the very next bar, between the root notes of the C chord and the A7. You can see we have exactly the same configuration as with the F and the D except the notes are on the A string and this time the movement of the chords is descending, so the chromatic link is from the C note down to the A note via the B and Bb notes. Now I find I play this in one of two different ways. Sometimes I hit the C chord on the first beat and place the link notes B Bb A on the beats ‘a 2 &’. So, that sounds like this Or I don’t bother to strike the actual C chord at all and just play the bass note run on the beats ‘1 a 2&’ like this. Both approaches work just fine so I suggest using whichever comes most naturally to you. There are a few more little tricks and tips that can be built into this song which, maybe I’ll go over another time if anyone’s interested. Meanwhile, if you would like to pick up loads more ideas about how to improve your acoustic guitar playing, then I would point you in the direction of our Intermediate Acoustic Guitar Course. You can start that right away by heading over to the Secret Guitar Teacher site and signing up for our thirty-day free trial. See you again soon!