TKenrick

Part of the problem is that the session 'scene' as it was in the golden era of the 70s/80s has all but died out, many studios have closed and it's possible to make a decent(ish) quality recording from home and/or program in the bass part using plugins. Not that is always the case, but it's definitely a factor in why we're not seeing a similar wave of younger studio players coming through.

As @Doddy and others have said, that's a good thing; you can't get around the bass properly with only one left hand fingering system. Not wanting to dismiss advice that others have given, but I feel the need to pipe up... I used to waste hours playing through left hand permutation exercises as a warm up and they didn't really get me anywhere; I made it most of the way through the Bass Fitness book and thought that meant that I could really play. The problem with the 1234 finger exercises and variations thereof are that they aren't remotely musical, so why waste time playing patterns that don't ever come up in music that you're trying to learn? Practice technique by playing music; if you struggle with a bass part, make that bass part your exercise. Work out the best left hand fingering and play the part really slowly (at least 50% of your goal speed, if not slower), focusing on making every note as clear as possible. Speed doesn't come from picking a random combination of fingers and cranking the metronome up until you start to develop tendonitis. Speed comes from accuracy and efficiency, which get programmed into your fingers by lots of repetitions at very slow tempos.

My vote for Get Lucky is B Dorian (although I hear the E chord as being a straight major, rather than dominant) rather than B minor. I think of it as being in A, but starting on the ii chord, but on gigs people always seem to call the key as the starting note to avoid confusion. If you try soloing over it, then G# sounds a lot more pleasant than G natural...

One of many things that I've stolen from the great saxophonist Bob Reynolds:

Full confession: I don't really play much fretless, but I do play upright, which suffers from the same problem of not having any frets... The way that I work on intonation is to use a drone; you can use Garageband or similar and find a synth sound that's as close to a plain sine wave as possible. Make a loop of a sustained pitch and make that note your key centre, then work on playing the major scale in that key really slowly (minims/half notes at 40bpm is a good place to begin) and you'll begin to hear when each degree of the scale is in tune relative to the drone. Some notes of the scale (root, 4th, 5th, octave) will be easier to gauge than others. Lather, rinse, repeat. Another key feature of fretless bass is vibrato - I learned a lot by slowing down recordings of Jaco (other fretless players are available) and really honing in on what his vibrato sounds like at 50% speed before bringing the tempo up.

A C chord would have sounded rather odd with the riff. As we're in the key of D major, there wouldn't normally be a C major chord; you might expect to see A major, as that's the only other possible major chord that can be built from the D major scale.

Things become a bit clearer (well, hopefully) if you 'add together' the harmony from the bass and the guitar at each point in the progression: D major with a D in the bass is pretty obvious. G major with D in the bass (the A and B notes fit nicely with the G chord as they're the major 2nd and major 3rd, giving a sort of major pentatonic flavour) = G/D, a G major chord in 2nd inversion. E minor with D in the bass (the A and B work because they're the 4th and 5th of the E minor chord, totally allowable notes to play) = Em/D, and Em7 chord in 3rd inversion. Everything here is still very much inside the home key of D major - the last chord gives some interesting intervals but our ears accept it because of the nice resolution when the progession moves back to D major. This trick of static bass notes under changing chords crops up all over the place, off the top of my head Ozzy Osbourne's 'Crazy Train', Free 'Alright Now', Van Halen 'Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love' and AC/DC 'Highway To Hell' all contain examples of this.

It should now work!

The Jackson Five Christmas Album is a great source of basslines, here's one of my favourites (I think it's Wilton Felder, but I can't seem to verify it): Transcription here: Jackson Five - 'Up On The House Top'

Personally I'd avoid it for as long as possible 😂 As far as American Boy goes, the prospect of thinking of it in E minor but with a Imaj7 chord makes me very twitchy indeed, interested to hear an explanation!

This is one of my favourite uses for a pick - I went through a long period of stubbornly playing 'Car Wash' with a pick on gigs and always felt it worked better than slapping. Go after the sound in your head and everything will work out. If we pay too much attention to the whims of the masses then we all end up playing relic'd p-basses strung with flats and everything becomes very dull indeed.

The song method gets banded about a lot, but I don't think it's the best way of thinking about common interval sounds... @stewblack from seeing your progress with transcription I know you have a decent sense of pitch, so it's my suspicion that you probably have much more vocal ability than you give yourself credit for. A possibly painful suggestion - record yourself matching pitches on your bass (piano works well, too) and see if you're in the right ballpark. Being a good singer isn't really necessary, it's about being able to hum/sing/grunt at the right pitch.

I think the most important thing is to be able to hear the intervals internally and recognise the sound - singing is the best way to verify that, because if you can't hear an interval or a phrase in your head then it's very difficult to sing it with any accuracy. If you can't match pitch with your voice then that's a very unhelpful observation... My preferred methods of ear-based torture are apps like Functional Ear Trainer and Chet, both of which turn ear training into a game and exploit your brain's attraction to novelty and reward. If you happen to be competitive (even just with yourself) then these are excellent ways to train your ears without realising it.

I have a set of shure 535 in-ears and it sounds like some of the drivers have gone in the left ear. Has anyone had a similar fault repaired, and was it worth it or should I just buy a new set? Shure seem to want £50 before they've even looked at the fault so I thought I'd try the BC hive mind first.

The outcome for any of the approaches depends entirely on the musicality of the player. As others have already said in this thread, everything that we're discussing involves putting labels on things to explain why certain sounds are 'correct' and others aren't. Having lots of different 'harmonic perspectives' (for lack of a better term) doesn't necessarily mean that you'll fair any better at improvising than someone who just knows that they should play mode X over chord Y. What matters is the end result; the music. There are tons of great players who don't know much theory, and lots of terrible players who know a lot. Off topic, but I think that a chord scale/mode approach to improvising (both basslines and solos) leads me to play much less musically than focusing on chord tones (again, a different view of the same notes). Horses for courses, but I think it's worth pointing out for people who are investing lots of time slogging away with modes and not getting the results that they want.

What I should have said is that since those modes are all derived from the same parent scale then if you play them over a static Dm7 chord then you're still just spelling out the same intervals relative to the Dm7 chord. It doesn't matter if you're thinking of it as C ionian, D dorian, G mixolydian or any other mode of C major; the listener will still hear you outlining a D minor chord with a natural 9 and a major 6. As I said before, I agree that thinking about the scale from different perspectives will lead you to play different phrases and emphasise certain pitches over others and lots of famous players (Gary Willis, Evan Marien, Anthony Jackson and many others) openly admit that they 'convert' chord harmony to fit their preferred scale choices; most of us do this habitually when we default to playing the minor pentatonic scale over a major chord. The point is that you're still using the same pool of notes, so the overall sound won't vary that much... I also don't think that this line of thinking is particularly helpful in the early stages of learning modes and improvising. Anyway, apologies @stewblack for derailing the thread.

I should really rename this series 'Groove of the Year', but I've finally got another one of these together. A great synth bass groove from Don Blackman that provides a wonderful excuse for me to break out some pedals and a fretless... Full breakdown with transcription here: Groove of the Week #56: Don Blackman - 'Yabba Dabba Doo'

It's hard to separate players who are not to my taste from those who hold a higher standing than their playing deserves, but... The only ones who spring to mind are Steve Bailey and Cody Wright. Not sure how the former got to be chair of the bass dept at Berklee, while the latter seems to be the poor man's Bobby Vega.

I read this a couple of times and might be misinterpreting it, but... Since D dorian, C ionian and G mixolydian are all the same scale, how is this playing different modes over Dm7? Agreed, thinking about playing C major over Dm7 will probably result in targeting different notes compared to thinking about D dorian, but you'd still be choosing from the same 'pool' of pitches regardless of which of those perspectives you choose, so the resulting sound is still D dorian in every case.

New transcription, this time featuring Dee Murray doing a superb job with Elton: Elton John - 'Rocket Man' bass transcription PDF

Thanks @philparker, very happy to hear that you're finding this stuff useful 😀

For me it's always alternate picking whenever I'm playing a line that ascends across adjacent strings and raking whenever I descend. I know this wasn't part of your question, but the phrase 'speed-building exercises' always worries me. If there's a piece of music that you can't get up to speed then just practise the music, don't waste time practising exercises that divorce technique from musical content or focus on mindless technique for technique's sake.

Such a great bassline, and an absolute guilty pleasure of a song. Thank you!

It seems I've been slacking off on the chart front... NoTreble were kind enough to feature an updated version of my chart for ABBA - Dancing Queen (this is by far the most popular chart on the website and is now much more accurate than the first one I wrote for a gig a decade ago!). Cliff Williams' parts are always a masterclass in simplicity, and AC/DC- You Shook Me All Night Long is no exception; the first inversion in verse 2 always makes me smile. Here's a snippet from one of Marcus Miller's early sessions with Bernard Wright - I heard Thundercat mention that this was one of his favourite basslines and realised that I'd never heard it:

I started out on one finger per fret and later got introduced to the 1-2-4 system, for me it's now a case of always having both concepts in my head when I'm playing and 'dipping in' to each one depending on what I'm playing (a sort of left hand 'doublethink', if you will). I don't think you can survive with just one approach, both have their advantages and limitations. My default setting is now 1-2-4, even in higher positions, as my hand feels more relaxed and secure than rigidly adhering to one finger per fret. The problem stems from trying to decide if the bass guitar is a big guitar or a small double bass. It's both, depending on what you're playing and which part of the neck you happen to be in. Regardless of which system you use, the important thing is that you're able to hold your notes to their maximum duration without holding any excess tension in your fretting hand; the left hand thumb is a vital part of this that often gets overlooked. I would say no - I play lots of upright, but I am by no means a double bass player. I think it's important to still view them as separate instruments to some extent, especially given considering how much more physically demanding the upright is compared to the electric bass.