Essential Blues Bass lines!

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my blogs – I’ll shortly be moving over to Blogger as I can upload Videos for free. I’ll let everyone know once I start moving things over!

So in this blog we will cover some cool essential bass lines that all bassists should know. They are also extremely useful for blues guitarists as well as can be played around with on guitar in different ways.

Our first cool bass line is based around a major 6th arpeggio. An arpeggio is where you are playing notes from a chord sequentially.

Let’s take an A6 arpeggio for example. It would contain:

Rootnote =  A

Major 3rd (3) 2 tones = C#

Perfect 5th (5) 3 1/2 tones = E

Major 6th (6) 4 1/2 tones = F#

The pattern we’ll use to start with will go like this (we’ll also include the octave (8) )

A   C#  E   F#  A   F#  E  C#

1   3    5    6    8    6   5   3

To get a nice groove going play 2 swung quavers per note. I’ve transcribed a 12 bar blues pattern using the same pattern above using A6, D6 and E6 arpeggios.

Pattern no.2 is using Dominant 7th arpeggios. These would contain:

Rootnote : A

Major 3rd (3) 2 tones = C#

Perfect 5th (5) 3 1/2 tones = E

Minor 7th (b7) 5 tones = G

Using the same playing pattern as with the Major 6th’s we’d get the following in an A blues progression:

You can also mix the 2 up to produce a bass line with a root, 3rd, 5th, 6th and b7:

Practice this in every key and play along to backing tracks online. There a millions of great blues backing tracks on Youtube you can use.

Also you can randomise the pattern so instead of going 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 6, 5, 3 you can jumble them up to create different options and sounds.

Hope you’ve found this blog useful.

You can find other excellent free info via the Jsmusicschool twitter feed @jsmusicschool @harvey_jsmusic

Many thanks

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

James

 

Dominant 9 and 13 chords for Blues rhythm playing

Hi There,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

In previous bogs on the blues we’ve understood how the blues works in ‘Understanding the blues’ and also how to add dominant 7 arpeggios to your improvisation.

Now for blues progressions the most commonly used shapes are your E and A Dominant 7 shapes below:

Now to spice up your typical blues progressions you can now introduce your funky sounding dominant 9th and 13th chords (the reason there’s no 11th chords is that they don’t sound particularly great!)

There are only really 2 shapes for each that I suggest below:

And for the dominant 13 (note due to the the fact that the chord has 7 notes 1,3,5,b7,9,11,13 one/2 intervals are left out):

So now you can use these different dominant chords as an when you like to give your blues playing some variety.

Many thanks for reading and hope you’ve found this blog useful

You can find other useful tips on twitter @jsmusicschool

ROCK N ROLL

James

 

Technical development: The CAGED system Pt. 2 – Major 7th chords

Hi there, In the first blog on the CAGED system we talked about how you can move your basic open major chords up the neck to produce 60 different voicings of the same chord. You can now apply the same process to your minor chords and also your extended 7th chords. This will give you a huge wealth of different options when playing, plus when wanting to work out your favorite bands songs, you’ll be able to work out what chords they’re playing much easier. There are 3 main types of 7th chords that tend to be used the most in my experience. These are Major 7, Minor 7 and Dominant 7 (7) chords Let’s take the Major 7 chords as an example. So the open caged shapes are as follows: So what you can do now is move the shapes up the neck by ‘barring’ what would have been some of your open strings. Like with your Major chords you have to change your fingering around to do this. So using these 5 shapes you can now play the same chord in 5 different positions down the neck, giving you a wide range of options Let’s take B maj7 for example – below you can see how to play B major 7 in all 5 shapes: When you are playing and writing songs, you’ll now have so many more options and voicings by using this system. Have a go at now doing Major7, Minor 7 and Dominant 7 chords in all 5 shapes in all 12 keys. Once you’ve done that you’ll have essentially 240 different voicings to your repetoire! Thanks for reading! rock n roll James

 

Adding Dominant 7 Arpeggios to Blues Improvisation

Hi There,

After my last post on ‘Understanding the Blues’ you are now aware that the Blues scale works great over Dominant 7th chords despite the note clashes.

Now what you can also use on top of that is Dominant 7 arpeggios.

An Arpeggio is essentially playing the notes that make up the chord sequentially (one after the other).

So an E7 chord contains the notes E,G#,B and D – this also makes up the 4 notes in an E7 arpeggio.

What arpeggio’s do is provide you with an additional set of notes to work with as well as the Blues scale which create different sounds.

So the E blues scale is E, G, A, Bb,B and D

an E7 arpeggio is E,G#,B and D

So you’ve got the G# in addition to the Blues scale.

Now in terms of coming up with riffs – play for example your E blues scale (first shape) over an E blues progression (E7,A7 and B7)

Then come up with a riff using an E7 arpeggio (in the CAGED system this would be the E shape) over the same sequence.

What that gives you is 2 different sound banks to work with – the Blues scale with the G is more Minor sounding and the Arpeggio more Major with the G#

So you want to see them as slightly different things but at the same time both work great over any blues progression.

To integrate them both into your playing – practice using a few notes from the Blues scale and then switch to the arpeggios.

It’s best not to overlay the Arpeggios onto the Blues Scale as there will be too many notes – Blues remember is all about feel so keep it simple!

Thanks for reading

James

 

Understanding the Blues

Hi there!

In this blog you will understand more of how the Blues works (and why its strange that it does!)

Now with most Major scale progressions and the Major/Minor scales and pentatonics this tends to conform completely with all musical formulas.

What the Blues does is actually break many of these conventions as you have many notes that ‘clash’ but for some reason sound great!

The Blues scale is essentially the Minor pentatonic scale with an added note (the b5 – often referred to as the ‘Blues’ note)

So it has 6 notes:

1, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7

(these are shorthand ways of writing Root, Minor 3rd, Perfect 4th, Diminished 5th, Perfect 5th and Minor 7th)

You’ll find all 5 shapes of the Blues scale scattered around the internet so practice these.

Now it’s all well just learning these but you need to know how to apply them over a chord progression.

Typically Blues progressions are the 1st, 4th and 5th notes of any major scale turned into Dominant 7 chords (usually abbreviated to just A7 etc)

So A blues scale would work best over A7, D7 AND E7

(a major scale is A,B,C#,D,E,F#,G#)

Now this shouldn’t work but it DOES. This is because some of the notes you are playing over ‘clash’ with the notes of the scale.

For example the notes of A7 has A,C#,E and G , but the A blues scale contains a C

This is just one example of how the Blues scale breaks a musical convention – but this also gives Blues it’s unique sound. So don’t aim to think to much about why all this stuff works as one of Blues defining characteristics is how it breaks away from traditional conventions

Practice your Blues scales over different 1,4,5 Dominant 7 progressions in various keys to take your Blues playing to another level,

Cheers for reading.

ROCK N ROLL

James