Building Great Bass Lines

If you want to be a great bass player, you need to understand chord structures and bass lines.  A great bass line is a string of notes that move smoothly from one chord to the next.  Generally the notes go up and then come down, a nice swing from low to high to low again.

I am really into studying bass and the composition of bass lines to jazz standards.

I am using my musical notation software to write walking bass lines to jazz standards.   This is giving me insights into jazz and chord structures.

My musical notation software allows me to write out a sheet of music, using the notes that I choose myself.  Then it lets me play the music back on my computer, so I can hear how the composition sounds.  If I don’t like the sound, I can change the notes to make it better.

I am studying something called “voice leading,” which means that when you play one chord (say Cm7 followed by F7), you move from the last note in C7 to the nearest note in F7, not necessarily to the root note, but to whatever note is closest.  It could be the 1^st, 3^rd, 5^th or 7^th of F7 in this example, but it can also be a passing note, a note in the respective scale that is not a note in the chord.

You could play Cm7 followed by F7 using chord notes in order:  C Eb G Bb  --  F A C Eb and it would work but sound dorky.  Using voice leading you could smooth out the bass line by playing the chords in this order:  C D Eb G, F G A C.  of course, D is not a note in Cm7 and G is not a note in F7, these are passing notes that smooth out the bass line and it sounds good.  The best use of passing notes are on the 2^nd and 4^th notes in the chord.

I am writing out a bass line to Autumn Leaves in G minor (Bb major) just to solidify my understanding.  I won’t do this for every song in my repertoire, but I will study each song separately to get the gist.

More about this later.

Decoding the Upright Bass: Voice Leading

A few years ago I became very interested in how a computer works, so studied various programming languages, i.e. machine language, Basic and C.  I wrote programs and debugged them, and figured out how to do things.  It was very instructional and also very intuitive.

Now I want to figure out how an upright bass works, and the program that I need to learn and apply is music theory.  Right now I am studying "voice leading," which is moving from one chord to the next, but since bassists play one note at a time, you must play the appropriate note in the "next" chord.  Specifically, you must play the closest note in the following chord to keep the intervals as small as possible.  This results in a smooth, fluid bass line.

For example, if you play F7 chord and then Bb7 chord, you could just play the straight arpeggios in order:

F7   = F, A, C, Eb
Bb7 = Bb, D, F, Ab

It would sound right but not very cool or fluid.  Instead, you might play Bb7 this way:
D, F, Ab, Bb (on the second and first stings)

Or also like this:
D, Bb, Ab, F (open D and then on the third and fourth strings)

With "voice leading" you play the nearest note in the next chord, which in this case is third of Bb, or D, as above.  Voice leading is the key to constructing professional, smooth sounding bass lines, by stringing the chords together in a fluid line.

The only way to learn to play "voice leading" chords in a bass line is to figure them out.  Take all the chord changes in the key of F (a blues key), figure out the voice leading note (or transition note), then play all the chords as a bass line.  Memorize the changes, play them like scales to instill them into your subconscious.

Shane Allessio, an accomplished upright bassist, discusses voice leading at the following link.