Electric Bass - Chris Squire

Difficulty - Beginner/Intermediate

This weeks transcription is another from the world of prog rock, this time the British band Yes. Owner Of A Lonely Heart was part of a playlist in one of the hotels we were staying at while on the road in Europe recently and it got me thinking about the 90125 album. It’s from an interesting period in Yes’ history, given that it originated from what was supposed to be a side project (Cinema), and hearing this track on the radio prompted me to not only go and re-listen to the record but also to transcribe Chris Squire’s bass line!

This song is something of an antidote to the idea that the Prog bands of the 70s/80s didn’t know how to write ‘songs’, the main groove and the chorus melody were in my head for a good day and a half after I heard it. Executing the song properly means working on a given idea and executing it consistently and repetitively, something i’ve been working on recently with some of my students. Alongside an incredibly catchy groove there are also fun instrumental unison lines and some lovely melodic ideas.

I don’t own a Rickenbacker and the closest I could get to Squire’s sound on this track was my Fodera in dual coil mode, biased towards the front pickup, EQ flat and my Boss CEB-3 chorus.

Hope you all enjoy!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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The full transcription is free via the link below, paid subscribers can download the transcription without a watermark.

Owner Of A Lonely Heart WM

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Hope you’re all keeping well (and staying cool and hydrated if you’re in Europe!), I’ve had several interesting conversations about teaching and what teaches us ‘best’ and what teaches us the most. Lots of interesting stuff covered but one thing consistently came up.

Failure.

Failure is uncomfortable. It’s hard. We don’t celebrate it. We avoid it if possible. It can be humiliating if the circumstances are public. What it does do however is tell us as students, very clearly and directly, the things that we NEED to be told as opposed to what we WANT to be told.

Branford Marsalis savages a number of his students in an old interview on YouTube, talking about how they only want to be told how good they are, and some teachers/listeners do indeed tell their students what they want to hear. This can come from not wanting to upset them, not have them flounce off and leave, among others… Failure, however, is entirely matter of fact. It isn’t good or bad, it isn’t polite or abrupt, It just ‘is’. It’s how you respond to it and learn from it that really matters here.

Failing at something as a musician is never a bad thing. It tells you what you really need to be working on in order to get better and indeed get where you want to be IF you’re honest enough to confront and learn from it without getting defensive or letting it demoralise you. You might want to be work on tapping or soloing but if you’re going on stage and you can’t nail down the key and form of the songs you’re supposed to be playing? That is telling you in the most direct and unvarnished way that you need to be working on those aspect of your playing, and if you want to be a better musician you should be paying attention to this as opposed to the other (perhaps more flashy and exciting) things. The universal thing that was come out of conversations with some world class musicians i’m fortunate enough to know is that they never stop working on those basics. We shouldn’t either.

How to make use of this? Here are two things I fall back on…

Record yourself regularly. One of the fun (and instructive) things about transcribing stuff for you all is that I get to hear myself on a regular basis, and when you hear a recording of yourself…you hear what you really sound like not what you ‘think’ you sound like as you’re playing (Real vs Feel as Janek Gwizdala says). Home recording has never been easier or more affordable, indeed my own recording setup consists of my basses, a small pedalboard, an interface and a macbook, and there is a wealth of free tutorials out there on YouTube to help you get started with this if you’re new to the concept! My recommendation to get going with home recording is always one of the Focusrite Scarlet units, they are incredibly easy and intuitive to use and come with some free recording software to boot! Record yourself at least once a week and you will never run out of things to practice, which bring me to the second thing…

Listen honestly to your own playing. While I don’t advocate for absolutely shredding everything you ever record (I don’t think it’s particularly healthy or helpful), you need to listen to yourself with a critical and honest ear. Treat your own recordings with the same respect you give to your own heroes and when you hear things that aren’t good enough or you don’t like? Devise a plan for your practice routine in order to fix them until they are no longer something that sticks out to you. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your playing career and you’ll never run out of things to practice and you will never stop improving!

If you enjoy the content I have here, you can support and contribute to me doing more of this for the price of a Café Nero latte (£4.10). Every single contribution is appreciated and enables me to bring more transcriptions, lessons and articles to the table!

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That extends to gigs and rehearsals, because how you (and your bandmates) perceive things when you’re within the band and how things actually sound can be very, very different. Record them regularly and find those things that bug you, that don’t go well, that you persistently make mistakes on and get in the practice room and fix them permanently! Do these things and you will be all the better for it I promise you.

In closing, embrace your mistakes. Pay close attention to them. Learn from them!

Electric Bass - Nathan East

Difficulty - Intermediate

Nathan East is one of those players that, when you listen to him, you often think “Yes. Perfect. Nothing else needed”. This is particularly the case in a lot of what he has recorded with the great singer Anita Baker, the record ‘Giving You The Best That I’ve Got’ being a favourite of mine.

This particular track, Just Because, not only demonstrates Nathan’s incredible sense of taste but also his absolute mastery of what I think of as ‘connective ideas’. The movement from one chord to another and one phrase to another appears completely fluid and rarely repeats the same exact idea twice. As the song moves on, Nathan’s ideas develop and he has some REALLY tasty fills towards the end, not that they are enormously complex or harmonically ambiguous but they suit the music and the mood just perfectly. All in all, it’s a perfect demonstration of why Nathan has been one of the first call bass players on the LA scene for decades.

I used my Fodera for this particular playthrough, pickups centred in single coil mode and the passive tone 60% open.

Hope you enjoy this one as much as I have!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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Just Because WM

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Electric Bass - Geddy Lee

Difficulty - Advanced

Hey everyone,

This transcription comes after checking out recent videos of Rush on the 50 Something tour with Annika Nilles on the drum chair (Spoiler altert: She’s ABSOLUTELY destroying it, as I anticipated she would. I feel that Neil is watching somewhere and smiling). This led me to going back through bits of the rush discography (i’ve got a couple of bigger cuts coming for subscribers in the next month or so) and one record that I keep coming back to is Counterparts.

This record doesn’t have the cache of Moving Pictures or Permanent Waves or the grand concept of 2112 but (for me at least) it has some great songwriting and some fantastic bass work by Geddy, chief among them Leave That Thing Alone.

This track has all the hallmarks of the ‘Rush Instrumental’, bass specific hooks (Geddy’s first entry in bar 5), bass leads, unison lines….it’s all in here! The unison line in 3/4 is particularly fun to play!

It sounds to me like Geddy is using his Fender J on this record (i’m not a Rush scholar on this point) so I went for my Fodera, pickups in single coil mode and the passive tone wide open. To get that Geddy bite I put it through my MXR M80 preamp/overdrive with the saturation dialled back a fraction and the top end boosted.

Enjoy!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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Leave That Thing Alone WM

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Having had questions about this topic (and having walked some of my students through this) recently, in this lesson i’m taking you through my process for arranging a basic piece of classical music, starting with the fundamental principles and ending with some of the embellishments you can add!

The arrangements include 4 and 6 string versions (or 5 string with a high C).

Enjoy!

Ben

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Electric Bass - Phil Lynott

Difficulty - Beginner/Intermediate

Hey everyone,

This one is a direct request from my dad and goes back to the very first band I ever played bass in! Prior to me sitting down a while back to transcribe this properly it was very much in the ‘sort of learned it but not really’ category, and having transcribed it properly (as with a lot of songs from this era), there are a range of little nuggets that jump out.

The first is the shift in inversions in the choruses, something that completely bypassed me as a teenager, but it’s a really fun little shift in the harmony! The other that comes to mind immediately is the shift to running 8th notes in the final part of the song, representing a real shift in energy that I wish I’d learned in full the first time around!

Given that I always associate Lynott with his black P bass, I grabbed my own Fender P for this recording, along with my Boss CEB-3 bass chorus plus a little additional processing in garageband.

Have fun!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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Dancing In The Moonlight WM

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Electric Bass - P-Nut

Difficulty - Intermediate

Hey all,

This weeks transcription features a band (and a bass player) that people keep requesting over on one of the other bass education platforms I work for, the band being 311 and the bass player being Aaron ‘P-Nut’ Wills. The track i’ve worked through here is Paradise from their debut album and there are various things about it that stand out.

The first is that active pentatonic-based line in the verses, there is a lot of life there and it’s a good example of how you can apply your pentatonic scales within a bass groove. In the chorus, P-Nut doesn’t hit the root on the second chord (C), something that really stands out given that we as bass players often fixate upon the root. Finally there are little things like the harmonics in the 4th bar of letter E (note that those need to be played just ABOVE 3rd fret) and the octave slapped figures!

P-Nut is known for his signature Warwick Streamer so I grabbed my own Warwick for this playthrough, straight into the interface with a little compression!

Enjoy!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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Paradise WM

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This is the final part in this series of lessons looking at chromatic approaches to triads! In this lesson we’re looking at combining double chromatic approaches to minor triads and looking at some grooves i’ve written to ddemonstrate.

In future lessons we’ll get into using chromatic devices over chord progressions, combining different chromatic approaches and chromatic devices such as enclosures but for now, have fun working on these grooves, and hopefully you can take some of my ideas and apply them to your own lines!

Enjoy

As always, the PDF and the backing track i’ve used can be downloaded below!

Chromatic Approaches Partt 12 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Part 12 - Track

For those of you who are paid subscribers, you’ll need the expanded PDF linked below for the additional bonus groove!

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Electric Bass - Robert ‘Kool’ Bell

Difficulty - Beginner

This is a song that sometimes comes up at gigs and the challenge is always not to overplay! Much like Billie Jean, Thriller and Play That Funky Music, the groove is incredibly consistent throughout and players often tamper with that to the detriment of the music (i’m not saying don’t add anything, just be judicious!)

For those of you towards the start of your bass journey and looking to build some repertoire, this tune is a fun one to work in, it’s not difficult technically and once you get the geography of the song worked out, it’s all about consistency of execution!

Yamaha BB was once again on duty for this, P pickup with the tone rolled off and my trusty MXR M80.

Have fun!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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The full transcription is free via the link below, paid subscribers can download the transcription without a watermark.

Get Down On It WM

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Hope you’re well, in this lesson we get into approaching minor triads using double chromatic approach from above each chord tone. Those of you that have been following this series will be well versed in my exercises built around the cycle of 4ths so this time we’ll get straight into some musical examples and how they have been constructed!

As always, the PDF and the backing track i’ve used can be downloaded below!

Chromatic Approaches Part 11 Basic

Chromatic Approaches Part 11 Track

For those of you who are paid subscribers, you’ll need the expanded PDF linked below for the additional bonus groove!

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Electric Bass - Curt Smith

Difficulty - Beginner/Intermediate

Tears For Fears are one of those bands that i’ve heard regularly but have never sat down and seriously examined, until this particular tune came on the radio as I was on my way to a gig, and as I sat there listening in the car quite a few things in the track really struc…

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In part 10 of this series on chromatic approaches to triads, we’re approaching our minor triads using double chromatics from below each chord tone.

Double chromatic approaches are one of the most useful pieces of chromatic vocabulary you can develop (as i’ll be illustrating in the next couple of weeks with some bass line breakdowns) and the more fluid you become with them, the more you will be able to integrate them into your own lines! One of the things I love about them is the really strong ‘pull’ they have towards the chord tone that makes for really effective harmonic resolutions.

Without further ado we’re going to look at a couple of useful exercises to develop basic fluency and an example bass groove. As always, the PDF and the backing track i’ve used can be downloaded below!

Chromatic Approaches Part 10 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Part 10 - Track

For those of you who are paid subscribers, you’ll need the expanded PDF linked below for the additional bonus groove!

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Electric Bass - Nate Watts

Difficulty - Intermediate

If you were to ask a bass player "what is a great Nate Watts bass line?” they might answer with Sir Duke, Master Blaster or maybe Do I Do (all excellent answers btw!). I would however wager that almost none of them would name this particular track, Gwen McCrae’s Keep The Fire Burning.

I was first exposed to Gwen’s music (and lots more besides) via some excellent Jonathan Maron seminars, and have loved her work ever since. This particular track has the same challenge as tunes like Billie Jean; it’s relentless, the groove never stops so there is certainly a degree of stamina required! The grooves themselves in the verse and chorus are fantastic illustrations of how you can write something catchy and propulsive with relatively simple harmony ingredients, in this case F minor pentatonic and chromatic approach notes. This is interspersed with little flashes of Nate’s phenomenal ability to lay down tasty ideas (that little fill in the last chorus before the slap line kicks in is killer). In the slap section, pay close attention to which parts are thumb and those that are popped, its quite surprising how few times Nate uses the pop!

This track suggested flats to me, so I went my my Yamaha BB, recorded through my Cali76 compressor, MXR M80 preamp into my Audient interface.

Enjoy!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

Request A Transcription

The full transcription is free via the link below, paid subscribers can download the transcription without a watermark.

Keep The Fire Burning WM

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In part 9 of this series looking at chromatic approaches, we’re looking at using single chromatic approaches from both directions to minor triads!

Combining approaches to the chord tones from both directions gives you some very useful (and powerful) tensions against the chord, and we’ll look at an example groove i’ve written to demonstrate.

Enjoy!

Chromatic Approaches Pt.9 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.9 - Track

For those of you who are paid subscribers, you’ll need the expanded PDF linked below for the additional bonus groove!

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Electric Bass - Nick Fyffe

Difficulty - Intermediate/Advanced

Hey all,

Slightly later than usual this week but I’d say it’s worth it! For me, Nick Fyffe is the great underrated bass player from the trio that have played with Jamiroquai (the others being Stu Zender and Paul Turner). His work on the Live In Verona record is amazing as is his work on the Synkronized album. This track is, for me, the standout track from that particular record and it’s been both fun and challenging to get it down!

Part of this comes down to how punchy Nick’s sound is and trying my best to replicate that myself, and part of it is the switch between punchy fingerstyle playing and the octave slap groove. Something I took particular note of are the little slides and grace notes that Nick puts into the line!

I’m not 100% sure which bass that Nick used on the record, but for Jamiroquai of all eras, I tend to reach for my Warwick Streamer LX, it just has a particular punch and bite to it that just works with their music!

Have fun with this one!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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The full transcription is free via the link below, paid subscribers can download the transcription without a watermark.

Soul Education WM

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Hope you’re all well, here is the latest installment in my series of lessons on Chromatic Approaches, this time focused on a single chromatic approach to minor triads from above.

As with the other lessons in this series, we’ll be digging into both some exercises to build fluidity and some example lines i’ve written for you to illustrate how you can use them!

As always, the PDF and the backing track i’ve used can be downloaded below!

For those working on groove 2…take your time with that final fill idea! ;)

Chromatic Approaches Pt.8 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.8 Track

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Electric Bass - Jerry Jemmott

Difficulty - Intermediate

Hey all,

Hope you’re all well (and for all of you in the UK, are keeping cool!). This weeks transcription is one that has been on the periphery of my awareness for some time now and as I’ve not yet done a Jerry Jemmott transcription, I decided it was past time I sat down and worked this tune out properly.

Aretha Franklin obviously needs no introduction from me but for those less steeped in bass history, Jerry Jemmott was one of the generation of players active right before Jaco and Stanley Clarke exploded onto the scene and transformed what was possible on the instrument and Jemmott is one of the players that Jaco repeatedly namechecked as a specific influence, specifically for the 16th note fingerstyle lines that are in evidence in this track.

Something that stuck out to me was Jemmotts use of open strings, something that i’ve also always noticed about James Jamerson. The open A string works very nicely in the section in Bb Major (A being the Major 7th) but he also integrates it in the B major section (which then gives a dominant 7 vibe without actually changing chord). Pay attention to some of the fills in the outtro, not hugely difficult but so tasty!

P with flats was the vibe I was getting from listening to the track repeatedly so I grabbed the Yamaha BB with the neck pickup soloed. I thought about using the P bass but given the temperature/humidity in my home studio right now the neck has a life of its own and it needs a setup….again :P

Enjoy!!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

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The full transcription is free via the link below, paid subscribers can download the transcription without a watermark.

Think! WM

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This is a short tutorial on one of a number of fills i’ve been writing that use the chromatic approach ideas we’ve been looking at in recent lessons.

It’s a fairly straightforward 16th note pattern, the real keys are the chromatic approaches and the way the line is phrased!

This is the first of what may be a whole series of tutorials on little pieces of vocabulary, so please let me know if you dig this!

Enjoy!

PDF and the backing track are below!

Chromatic Approach Fill Idea

Chromatic Approach Fill Track

Electric Bass - Melvin Dunlap

Difficulty - Intermediate

Hey all,

Hope this finds you all well! This weeks transcription is a tune I hadn’t heard in a VERY long time until a bass playing friend of mine sent me a playlist he’d put together, and listening to it reminded me just how much I like this particular line!

Express yourself was the signature song for Charles Wright and The Watts, and Melvin Dunlap delivers an absolute masterclass in varying the connective ideas while maintaining the integrity of the overall groove! Keep an eye out for where he startts dropping the first 16th of the bar, and work to nail down the various different connective fills/ideas!

My Yamaha with flatwounds was once again the bass of choice here, with my MXR M80 and a little compression added.

Have fun with this!

You can request a Transcription below. I also offer a bespoke transcription service. I charge £40 for most transcription requests; more complex transcriptions are on a case-by-case basis, and I will provide a specific quote at my own discretion. If you pay for a transcription, you will receive a copy without a watermark.

Request A Transcription

The full transcription is free via the link below, paid subscribers can download the transcription without a watermark.

Express Yourself WM

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This article comes off the back of a conversation I had a couple of days ago about the state of the world of music, more specifically the perceived quality of the music being released today.

What I often hear (sometimes from people above a certain age) is that music being released today is worse or somehow lesser than the music being released several decades ago. Personally? I don’t think this is true. I think more great music is being released now than at any time before. The real question now is finding it.

What I think can be said is that composition and trends within mainstream music have indeed changed. mainstream pop music tends to be less complex compositionally than it was in the 60s and 70s and one could argue that it has in some ways become a lot ‘safer’ thematically. Some of this can be attributed to changing tastes of listeners, part of it can be attributed to technological developments in the studio and part of it can (I feel) be traced to record labels not being willing to take risks and essentially only backing/putting out music that it’s sure will deliver a return.

This last point (to me at least) represents a shift, from record labels being the ‘curators’ of music to them being concerned with the bottom line above all else. Back in the 70s bands/artists would have multiple attempts to get a successful album out and they would (thinking of Rush in particular here) be given time and space (occasionally grudgingly) to allow their artistic vision to mature, something I feel has now been lost. Bands were also allowed to go for broke with a big idea (thinking of the Yes album Tales From Topographic Oceans) again, something I can’t imagine one of the larger labels doing today.

So if the legacy labels are mostly concerned with what will sell rather than artistic vision above all else, where does that leave us?

With independent labels and independent artists.

One of the biggest benefits of new musical technology has been the widespread ability to record music on home computers instead of in a studio. Thus, instead of the major labels ultimately deciding who can and can’t make a record, anyone with some basic technical know-how and some basic hardware/software can get music recorded and released via platforms such as Bandcamp. While this means that the curation/selection of music is no longer happening in the way that it used to, the barriers to entry have been all but removed; anyone with an idea no longer needs to cosy up to the labels in order to get their music recorded and released.

We just need to look a little harder to find the island music we love among the ocean of music being released.

How can we work to find it? The two sources i’ve come to rely on are bandcamp (I find that their artist recommendations are pretty well in the ballpark, for myself at least) and keeping my eyes and ears open for recommendations from musicians and friends whose word I trust. If you have musician friends, talk to them regularly about what music they are listening to…you never know what direction you might end up being pointed!

On that note, here are some fantastic records I’ve discovered relatively recently, all released independently or on small labels

If you enjoy the content I have here, you can support and contribute to me doing more of this for the price of a Café Nero latte (£4.10). Every single contribution is appreciated and enables me to bring more transcriptions, lessons and articles to the table!

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Msafiri – Simon Peter King

Given that I work with Simon I didn’t have to look too hard for this one, but this is one of my favourite records thus far of 2026. Simon is an incredible musician, photographer, chef, composer….the list goes on, and while the playing on display is absolutely stellar, the thing that really caught me was the level of compositional clarity and depth. I’ll leave you to listen for yourselves :)

Favourite tracks - 07 Fleche, Navigator

Great Album – GREAT TIME

I was introduced to GREAT TIME by Jonathan Maron (who has introduced me to a LOT of great music, thank you Jonathan!) and although they are currently on hiatus (and i’d wager unlikely to reform) they have left some wonderful music behind. I’m not entirely sure where they fit within the genre spectrum and their music is all the more fun and compelling for it. Oh and if you’re a bass player…go and check out their single ‘Rushin’…Zack Hartmann came up with a KILLER line on that track.

Favourite tracks – one.thirty.seven, Fruitrip

Kintsugi – Jack Gardinier

I first became aware of Jack via his collaboration with Henrik Linder (Dirty Loops) and after watching (and loving) several of his videos on YouTube I then found that he had just released a new record, Kintsugi.

It’s unashamed instrumental guitar music but with an element of fun that I often see from Plini, where the chops involved are devastating and yet aren’t taken too seriously. Jack’s music also has lovely elements of melody and texture about it that I really enjoy (as opposed to being hit over the head with notes).

Favourite tracks – Fanboy, Moon Over Mango

Amiira – Curious Objects

It’s perhaps inevitable that a record with Bjorn Meyer on it would find its way into this list but the music Bjorn ends up playing/playing on almost always seems to hit the musical spot for me. He has a lot of room to move with Amiira and the overall space and textures of this record are something i’m enjoying more and more with instrumental music of late. Bjorn, Sam Rohrer and Klaus Gesing are all beautifully recorded here, making their artistic contributions all the more wonderful.

Favourite tracks - Garden Of Silence, Where We Go From Here

I hope you enjoy the music i’ve shared as much as I have, and remember….a lot of great music is out there.

We just need to have the patience and persistence to go find it.