Electric Bass - Fred Brown

Difficulty - Beginner/Intermediate

Hey all,

This weeks transcription features an artist I was first introduced to by the great Jonathan Maron. Gwen McCrae isn’t perhaps as well known as some of the other great American singers but she certainly deserves to be and for us bass players, her music is a real pleasure to both transcribe and play!

Funky Sensation isn’t the trickiest of her tunes to play but the groove itself is a real gem! It’s one of those songs where at first glance it’s very repetitive, but when you dig into it and pay attention (particularly towards the end) there are lots of little variations in there!

The original sounds like it was recorded on a P bass with flats so I chose my Yamaha BB (especially as the TI flats have now settled really nicely!).

Hopefully you enjoy digging into this as much as I did!

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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Funky Sensation WM

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Hope this finds you well, this weeks lesson builds on what we looked at last time only now we’re approaching our major triad from a double chromatic (two half steps/two frets) above!

As I mentioned in the last lesson, this sort of vocab is something I heartily recommend working into your vocabulary and playing, it an incredibly useful and powerful tool to have and is a way you can rapidly expand a bass line/idea beyond your basic chord tones.

We’ll look at a couple of exercises that build on our last lesson and a new groove idea to put them into practice.

Enjoy!

Chromatic Approaches Pt.5 Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.5 - 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 - Norman Watt-Roy

Difficulty - Advanced

Hey everyone,

This weeks transcription is one i’ve been planning for a little while now, an absolute classic within the bass repertoire and a tricky line to nail down. Norman Watt-Roy’s line on Rhythm Stick is one of those seminal tunes that you get a real sense of satisfaction from working through so have some fun digging into this!

As with tunes like Hysteria, a lot of this is about getting the plucking and fretting fingers organised, especially with the little shifts around the fingerboard between the verses and the choruses. The TAB is my own suggestion for this but other solutions are possible!

The tighter spacing on my Yamaha BB5000 definitely helped with this tune, and the only other thing in the chain was my MXR M80.

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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Rhythm Stick WM

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Welcome to part 4 of this series covering chromatic approaches to triads! In this lesson we’re going to stick with our major triads and start looking at approaching the chord tones using double chromatic approach.

Double chromatic means that we’re approaching the chord tones from two half steps (in order), and I would argue that this is a CRUCIAL piece of harmonic vocabulary to nail down and (as i’ll show you in some future bass line breakdowns), they are EVERYWHERE!

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 Pt.4 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.4 - 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 - Nigel Harrison

Difficulty - Beginner

Hey everyone,

This weeks transcription features another band I was introduced to by my parents (my mum rather than my dad this time!), Blondie and this track is from their classic album Parallel Lines. Nigel Harrison laid down several notable lines on this record but Heart Of Glass has always been the one that stood out for me.

Part of the reason is the disco-esque octaves you hear in the choruses, another would be the shifts to 7/4 (prog nut here!) as well as the overall feel of the line! Lots of fun to be had digging into this song!

Signal chain was P bass - Cali76 compressor - interface, nothing fancy!

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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Heart Of Glass WM

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This is the first of what will hopefully be a long series of tutorials of some of my favourite bass lines/songs, and we’re starting with the Dream Theater song Scarred from the album Awake (1994)!

Awake (for me) features some of John Myung’s best bass work and along with Scenes From A Memory, Falling Into Infinity and Change Of Seasons represents a real halcyon period for Dream Theater. The tapped intro from Scarred was one of the first things I tried to learn when I switched to 6 string bass and having done a complete playthrough on a recent session (linked below), I thought i’d also do a quick tutorial for you all!

PDF with notation/TAB is available below. Enjoy!!

Scarred - Basic

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

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Electric Bass - Mattias Larsson

Difficulty - Beginner

This weeks transcription is a tune i’ve not looked at in a minute but it randomly came over the radio while I was driving to a gig recently and that reminded me how much fun this line is to play!

At face value, it’s basically the same groove idea in two different octaves! The challenge is nailing down the line and executing it over and over again without making mistakes ;) We used to play an extended version of this with solos and we had plenty of room to stretch out but the basic studio version is a great example of being able to execute an anchoring idea over and over again with consistency.

I’ve been really enjoying using my Yamaha to record recently and I grabbed it for the lovely, wide low end its giving me now that i’ve got a set of TI flatwounds on it! Full signal chain was Yamaha - Cali76 compressor - MXR M80 - Interface.

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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Cake By The Ocean WM

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In this lesson, we’re going to take the single chromatic approach notes to our major triad that we’ve discussed in the previous two lessons and combine them!

We’re going to do this through dissecting an example groove I’ve composed and taking a look at which approach notes have been used and where. The backing track is the same one used for the previous two sessions so if you’ve already got it, grab the PDF and you’ll be good to go!

PDF is available below. Enjoy!!

Chromatic Approaches Pt.3 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.3 - 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 - Noel Redding

Difficulty - Beginner/Intermediate

Hey everyone,

This week’s transcription goes back to one of the first cover band’s I ever played in, as well as a movie introduced to me by my dad (Wayne’s World 1 for those of you with longer memories!), Jimi Hendrix’s Fire.

Hendrix obviously needs no introduction but it was only much later when I was digging into Hendrix’ background for a university assignment that I learned that the other members of The Jimi Hendrix Experience were British rather than American, including his bass player Noel Redding!

A lot of the bass lines for Hendrix’ work are firmly in the supportive role (to let Hendrix be…well…Hendrix!), but there are some little details here and there that change…sometimes there is a slide, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the idea is a quarter note, others it’s a set of 8ths! The basic ideas and form aren’t too hard to get down and for those more advanced, you can aim to nail down the entire tune.

I had to go with the P bass for this track, and the only other thing in the chain before the interface was my Cali76 compressor!

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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Fire WM

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Welcome to part 2 of this new video series on chromatic approaches to triads. In this lesson we’re going to look at approaching the chord tones of the major triad from a single chromatic note above.

The single chromatic above the chord tone introduces a different sort of tension to the chromatic note below, it’s a little more ‘outside’ and as such can introduce a very cool, interesting sound to your bass lines! We’ll look at a variation of the cycle of 4ths exercise we looked at in the previous lesson and I have some new groove examples for you too.

PDF and backing track are available below. Enjoy!!

Chromatic Approaches Pt.2 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.2 Track

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

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Electric Bass - Deon Estus

Difficulty - Beginner/Intermediate

NOTE: To play along with the record and not have your tuning jar your ears, set your tuner to 445hz!

Hey all,

This one falls under the heading of ‘learned but never learned properly’. I was watching a video about the late great Deon Estus (who not only played on this record but also played many of Wham!’s great bass lines) and decided to go and do a proper transcription!

I’m quite glad I did because (as with a lot of the music I transcribe here) there are lots of fun little details in there to chew over! The little scale runs Deon puts in in the pre-choruses, the slides and subtle bends and the supreme control of note length! In fact, i’d say that getting the note lengths right is somewhat key to nailing the overall tune, more so that the individual pieces of vocab!

I’ve been really enjoying the way my Yamaha records with the new TI flatwounds so I grabbed that for this recording too! Also in the chain was my Cali76 compressor and the MXR M80, straight into the interface/garageband where I added a little reverb!

It’s a fun and accessible tune to play, I hope you enjoy digging into it!

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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Faith WM

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This is the first of a new video series i’ve put together covering the use of chromatic approach notes to triads, both within a given chord and using them within a wider progression/moving through chord changes!

Chromatic approaches (and chromaticism in general) are an incredibly powerful tool to have in your locker of vocabulary and as such I would encourage players of all levels to become proficient in their use!

In this first lesson we’re going to look at approaching the notes of the major triad from a single chromatic note below the target chord tones. We’ll 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 Pt.1 - Basic

Chromatic Approaches Pt.1 Track

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

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Electric Bass - Dave Hope

Difficulty - Intermediate/Advanced

Hey everyone,

This transcription comes after something of a recent prog rock deep dive I took and one of the bands I went back to (alongside Genesis and King Crimson) was Kansas. I feel they sometimes get a little overlooked in the Prog discussion but the Song For America record is (to me) full on progressive music! I wanted to transcribe something for you all that WASNT Carry On Wayward Son, and I settled on Lonely Street.

This track serves as a great introduction to progressive music, featuring a time signature of 11/8 and some little fiddly lines in the choruses (though nothing too outrageous). If you’ve never played prog rock before, this would be an excellent starting point!

I’m no great pick player (though I’m sure Dave Hope is using a pick on the record) so i’m using fingers but something to really pay attention to is the switch between a palm muted sound and an open sound.

Chose the P bass for this going through my MXR M80, drive engaged to add a little grit to the sound!

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.

Lonely Street WM

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I’m writing this as I’m about to go away on holiday, but having just finished a teaching session where I touched on the idea of using a piece of music (in this case Stevie Wonder’s ‘Do I Do’) as a long-term study piece (in this case as a way of building yourself technically) I thought this was a concept worth me expanding upon in an article for you all.

Study pieces are generally used for intensive work in a specific area of music or for specific personal reasons. These reasons are wide ranging; they can be used to push your technical limits on your instrument, to improve your skill at navigating through difficult harmony, to improve your aural and analytical skills or it could be a seminal piece of repertoire that you want to tick off on your checklist (something I very much recommend having) among others. The key point with study pieces is that they are somewhat beyond your current level of musical ability, these are not musical works that you’ll be able to nail down in a week or two.

The value in working on study pieces over an extended period is a multi-layered cake, and I’ll go through the main points and benefits here for you!

Technical proficiency

This is perhaps the most obvious one. Pieces like the Bach Cello Suites (sheet music available at IMSLP.org!), Jaco’s Donna Lee or Teen Town or more recently Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick or perhaps Vulfpeck’s Dean Town are all used by players looking to work on their technical prowess and push themselves beyond what they’re currently capable of. One of the benefits of doing this is that your regular selection of repertoire will begin to seem that much easier to navigate, and your ‘B’ game (when you’re not at your absolute best) will also elevate as your ‘A’ game improves. One point of caution with this is not treating these pieces as pure technical drills. Having the raw technique to play them along with a click is one thing, having the skill and technique to make music out of them is another thing entirely. This means having the technical capacity to make musical choices even with hard music, so once you can get through the piece from a purely technical standpoint…then the musical work begins! Don’t neglect that!

Harmonic proficiency

Improving your harmonic awareness and your skill at fretboard navigation are ALWAYS worthy goals to have. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be blasting your way through Giant Steps. That’s certainly something of a harmonic benchmark, but it could be that you’re just at the point of being able to navigate a basic ii-V-I progression, in which case you might want to be considering working through something like All The Things You Are or Autumn Leaves. If we move away from the world of Jazz, you might want to consider tunes like Steve Wonder’s ‘My Cherie Amour’ or perhaps doing a harmonic analysis of some of the other, more complex, Motown tunes! The key thing with harmonic work is to start with your basics and more specifically, to be examining them from all angles! You’re good with root position triads around All The Things You Are? Now try those same triads in first and second inversion, then try all the inversions with different permutations, before you move to any other harmonic devices. Always see if there is another angle to explore with a given piece of harmonic information before you decide to move on!!

Seminal Repertoire

All genres of music have their pieces of seminal/essential repertoire, in other words those pieces/tunes that you should know and have in your locker if you want to understand the music. Within Jazz for example, you need to have Rhythm Changes down, you need to have Autumn Leaves, Footprints, So What, All The Things You Are, All Blues and various other essential standards down. Within Progressive Rock you’ll want to be aiming to have Money (Pink Floyd), Carry On Wayward Son (Kansas), Tom Sawyer (Rush), Roundabout (Yes) in the locker. If you’re into Motown that means tunes like My Girl, I Want You Back, Higher And Higher, Heatwave, Heard It Through The Grapevine…every genre has its staples! If you’re serious about wanting to dive into a particular area, I absolutely recommend making yourself a checklist of those tunes you want to have down and starting to work through it. As above, you want to make sure you’re covering all the angles with these. Sound, phrasing, note lengths, note placements, articulation, these are all aspects of the music that you should be paying really close attention to in order to understand the music (and the bass playing!) at a deeper level. The notes are one thing, how they are played is a very different thing. Take your time with this, endeavour to fully understand what it is that makes the music great and fully explore what you can get out of the music before you tick the box and move on.

Breaking Through Plateaus

Improving your skill level is never a linear process (much though we might wish otherwise!), we will often hit little plateaus where we feel a little stuck and that we’re not getting any better. Programming a study piece into your practice routine is an excellent way to break through these, because they take you down a deep rabbit hole that will really push you musically, which (as with work in the gym) will often break through a particular ceiling that is frustrating you. They also add some variety into your routine which often gives the brain chance to fully process the information you’ve been trying to take in from elsewhere in your practice.

Aural And Analytical Skills

Doing an in-depth analysis on a piece of music you love is a fantastic way to not only improve your skill but also to better understand yourself in a musical sense. We all have our own likes and dislikes within music, but we don’t always take the time to understand why that might be, and this is something which can not only help you understand yourself but also fast track you to developing more of your own ideas. Harmonic analysis is the obvious candidate here but rhythmic analysis (particularly of bass lines) is also a rich seam of inspiration you can tap into! Different rhythmic concepts produce different results within the music, which you can then transfer into your own lines so analysing music where the music is very different rhythmically to what you are used to can provide a real catalyst for fresh ideas of your own! Having and maintaining that curiosity is perhaps a topic for a separate article but always be guided and fueled by that feeling of ‘that’s cool, I have no idea what is going on but I want to find out!’.

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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Teaching Yourself Patience

Patience is something I find most of us need to work on a little. In today’s world there is more (of everything) available to us almost immediately than at any time in history. You want food? You can get it delivered to your door almost any time of the day or night. You want to know a fact? You have the power of the internet right there on your smart phone. Music is, however, one of the things in our lives where there is no shortcut. You must have the patience and tenacity to do the work and working on study pieces is an excellent way of teaching yourself to be patient, because the only way you will achieve anything with them is through patience, practice and tenacity. It’s been found that people that go to the gym are more patient because they come to realise that results there only come with patience, sweat and trusting the process. The exact same thing applies here. Through working on large scale works like the Cello suites, or something that is well beyond your technical level of facility and pushing yourself to be better than you currently are, you’ll not only appreciate the process and feel a real sense of achievement when you get there, you’ll also have a more patient approach to things, something which, as a parent, is absolutely invaluable.

Hopefully you’ve gotten some ideas from this article for some potential study pieces of your own, I honestly feel they are an incredibly valuable area of practice to spend time on. If you’re going down this route do let me know in the comments what you’re going to be working on! Me personally? I’m recording this in a couple of months, so once i’m home from Portugal/Spain, this will be spending a LOT of time on the workbench!

Hope you’re all well! This is a short tutorial covering an exercise that I use on a daily basis to help with my basic level of technical fluency with both the left and right hands. I know it as the ‘X’ exercise because when you work through a bar it looks like you’re drawing an X on the fingerboard. Here i’ll show you not only the basic version of the exercise but several ways in which is can be expanded and modified to get a LOT of additional mileage from it!

Without further ado, let’s get going!

The X Exercise Basic

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

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Electric Bass - Jerry Knight

Difficulty - Intermediate

Hey everyone,

Hope you’re all well! This week’s transcription is one i’ve enjoyed playing in various bands for some time but have never sat down to properly transcribe in full. Bill Withers’ music is full of great bass lines but if we’re talking essential bass repertoire, this tune is it.

As with a lot of his tunes, the devil is in the detail. Jerry Knight is on sparkling form on this recording and things like note lengths, note placement, the variations between the bridges…lot’s of little things to look out for but ones that really make the line!

Having just gotten my Yamaha fitted with flatwounds (and back from having a new volume pot fitted), I decided to put it straight to work! The only other thing in the signal chain was my MXR M80 to add a little low end to the sound, then straight into the 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.

Lovely Day - WM

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Electric Bass - Flea

Difficulty - Intermediate

Hey all!

This week’s transcription goes right back to when I first started playing bass in 2004! A lot of players of my generation were introduced to the Chilis via Californication or By The Way, my own introduction to them (and to Flea) was through Mothers Milk and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, which leads me to this tune - Funky Crime!

While not as frenetic as songs like Get Up And Jump or Skinny Sweaty Man, Funky Crime has all the hallmarks of Flea’s earlier work with the Chili’s, moving between 16th fingerstyle lines and a section of percussive slap.

I’m not sure whether Flea was using his Stingray or his Spector NS-2J for this cut, but for my own playthrough I selected my Fodera Monarch, pickups in dual coil setting, tone control wide open and treble boosted, going through my Cali76 compressor into my interface!

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.

Funky Crime WM

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This lesson follows on from last week’s where we were using broken 3rds to get more mileage from our major scale. This week, we’re stepping it up to broken 6ths!

Broken 6ths not only introduces us to a more angular sound and approach, there are also various technical benefits to be had through working on it such string crossing AND string skipping, both in the fretting and plucking hands.

Enjoy!

Dexterity Using Scales - Basic

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Electric Bass - Guy Pratt

Difficulty - Intermediate

Hey everyone,

This week’s transcription is a tune that has seen something of a renaissance in the last couple of years (both on radio and on the function/corporate scene) and one i’ve been called on to play multiple times, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder On The Dancefloor featuring Guy Pratt (of Pink Floyd/Madonna/Tom Jones fame) on bass.

The song itself is relatively straight ahead pop but the bass line really shines, something that quite surprised me when I first played it! There are lots of little nuggets in there, little slides up to notes, ghost notes, switching between short (staccato) and long (legato) articulation…the devil is most definitely in the details here! Guy also adds subtle variation to the line here and there, double plucks on certain octaves for example!

I chose my Fodera for the playthrough mainly because I was hearing something bright and punchy (possibly a J bass) on the record, so it’s set in single coil mode, a little bass boost and the tone control 50% open. The only other thing in the signal chain was my Cali76 compressor, after which it went through the interface into the computer.

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.

Murder On The Dancefloor WM

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In this lesson we’re talking Major scales, and an exercise that can help you get a lot more out of them by challenging you technically, getting you to see the scale as something other than 8 notes in linear order and helping you with interval recognition! So if you’re a little bored with your scale practice, check this out!

Scales In Broken Intervals Basic

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