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 learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regression 
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Post learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regression
Hey guys,

I was posting in "Weak bassist" about limitations in my bass playing. Well, the revelations continue. Let me share:

In working with the Ed Friedland's "Building Walking Bass Lines" - an excellent book - I found that Mr. Friedland limits the beginner to root on beat 1 (exclusively), and fifth on beat 3 (mostly), and keeps the chord progression identical throughout the first part, for pedagogical purposes. This allows the student to focus strongly on approach tones on the weak beats. How wonderful! It reveals the walking bass to be as powerful an abstraction as the figured bass in the classical world - just horizontal rather than vertical. You're always moving from weak beat to strong beat in your thinking.

So, the end goal is to sight-read a chart with no notes, just chords, and lay down a killer walking bass.

Approach tones are 1) chromatic (upper and lower) 2) double chromatic - two successive chromatic tones moving to the strong beat (generally beat 1), 3) dominant (up a fourth or down a fifth), and 4) scalar (which could be chromatic or stepwise, obviously).

Friedland gives examples in C, Bb, F, and Eb, and then gives the student the challenge of reading a chords-only chart, for each type of approach.

This is all just in the first part of the book. I haven't gotten to the second part yet.

So I've drafted templates in all 12 keys of root & fifth notes for all the chords in the chart. And I've got two or three possibilities for each note. So I found it
quite difficult to sight read my way through! Just root & fifth - no approach notes. (I'll post a photo).

Why? Because in Bb I have two Bb's possible on beat 1, to move to three possible F's on beat 3. That's about five choices, musically speaking, and that's just the first measure! Using the metronome, and tapping weak beats with the left foot, making those choices at sight is a little daunting! It's definitely something I"m ambitious about. You could stay as low as possible, as high as possible, or stay somewhere in the middle of the range. Then, there is the choice of where to play. My Stick sounds great on all three bass strings (6, 7, & 8) way up the neck.

And here is the GRAND REVELATION - I don't know where the notes are on my instrument! Aside from a go-to Bb or F, and maybe finding the octave from there, I don't know what I'm doing. And I've been playing for 28 years!
How about that!

It's as if the Stick were a million-book library, and I"ve been re-reading the same old Disney comics for almost three decades. What a humbling experience.

Comments welcome.

R


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Sat Jan 02, 2016 9:54 am
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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
Rodan,

This is a nice comment worthy discussion.

1) In response to where to play: There is a limited range of pitches where it is actually a walking *bass* line. If you go too high, it may walk, but isn't in a bass range. As a bass player before being a Stick player, it is fun to drive the notes upward into the treble range, but they have to bring the thunder as well.

2) Why are you having trouble with this exercise with the only rules as beat 1 being the root and beat 3 being the fifth? Are you doing so much in the right hand that you are distracted? Are you judgmental on what happens on beats 2 and 4? Are you paralyzed by creative options? Each of these scenarios can be addressed. If you are distracted, simplify the right hand until the left hand is more adept. If you are judgmental, stop it. There are no wrong notes in a walking bass line, only wrong applications. Notes are either in the scale or are grace notes leading into the scale. Using the proper rhythm and attack makes every note acceptable. You mentioned having lots of choices for which Bb or F to play. If this paralyzes you, choose it ahead of time and add it to your list of restrictions along with root on beat 1 and 5th on beat 3.

Tell us how it goes with more practice.

-Daniel

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Sat Jan 02, 2016 11:18 am
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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
Very cool thread.

So lemme get this straight... You want to play a walking bass line over a sight-read batch of changes. Kind of like flipping open the real book and being your own sort of "band in a box".

Cool. From day one, I have wanted to hammer out some kind of groove and play "my brand" of solo over top. I thought it wouldn't be too much to ask to be able to sight read from the real book the same as as I do with guitar, only with a bass side accompaniment. Easy to think about, but much harder to put into practice.

So, as a guitarist I found that the Stick is a VERY different animal. Kind of a distant cousin to guitar... As a bassist, I found that the Stick is an EXTREMELY different animal. It took a year, but after a bunch of lessons, a ton of false starts and a lot of discussion with people who have attained something close to two hand independence on a variety of instruments, I am finally on my way...

"Simplify." "Slow down." "Focus your energy."

So, in my lessons with Steve A, I would always get hung up on finding a note. He'd say "Oh it's an 'F' on the 3rd string, and I would hunt and peck for the note. Damn painful, and after ten lessons of this it became very apparent to me; LEARN WHERE THE DAMN NOTES ARE.

So my giant goal of "two hand independence" has a bunch of sub-goals. Of course it does...

I learned a bunch of tunes with Steve, left hand plays root and tenth while the right hand plays melody. Sadly, the level of concentration required to keep both parts going lead to about a 75% chance of failure. I thought about it for a while, and I talked to a really good Stick player by the name of Kevin Chiasson. Picked his brain, and lo and behold, he said that every new song (He likes David Tipton a lot! Hint hint) learned was kind of akin to "splitting the atom" and man, did I agree. We messed around with "Mad World" which is an EXCELLENT tune to start with. And I made some observations about that...

It took a good evening to get the melody and the bass parts down separately. Another night or two to sandwich the two together, and I am STILL making mistakes on the tune a good two months later. Getting better, though....

So another realization; it takes absolutely forever to learn even a simple song. Not cool. On guitar I can learn a Vai tune in an evening... On Bass, I have played everything from Johnny Cash to Primus. WHY DOES IT TAKE SO LONG (on stick)? Surely I should be able to leverage SOME of my previous experience, right?

Self test time. How well do I actually know the parts separately? Ouch! As I found, in "Europa" I learned the melody part pretty quickly, but it required a lot of concentration to play it. You know, I had to look at the neck to play it. And the bass part, well it was the same. Take the eyes off the neck and I was "hunting and pecking". Revelation.

I realized that I need to know my parts better. So at what point is it that you "know" it? Well for me, it's the point of being able to play the parts by themselves without looking. You really know it if you can play it and keep a conversation going.

So if "Tenths and Melody" style playing was a problem, guess what kind of a challenge playing a rhythmically unique "walking" bassline that outlines chord changes and changes directions all the time was going to be...? Especially if one is struggling with simple intervals. Sightreading a melody while trying to play these kind of bass lines, well that is a case of biting off more than is chewable in my opinion. How about improvising? Good lord...

Steve A and I talked about his ingenious compass method/idea. But you know what? Although I understand it conceptually I am just not ready for it. Brett Bottomly does some very cool stuff, and yep, I definitely plan to play like that. But... I am just not ready yet. Greg Howard, Bob Culbertson, Emmett Chapman... They do some wild stuff, but I am not ready, as simple as that.

Basics. Does a beginning guitarist start with Chet Atkins? Tuck Andress? Steve Vai? No.

The Free Hands book has a "basic techniques" section; Lesson 2, pgs 7-11. Intervals, approaches and chordal ideas. I read this over several times throughout the last year. Really, I am just not ready for the rest of the book. The more I think about it, I am just not ready for the Stick book or Bob's DVD's, Steve's DVD's or even lessons. There's work to be done.

So I have taken a kind of multi tier'd approach to my practice, and it is working. I like to think of this next year as my "getting ready to get ready" phase. Heh, there are a few different aspects I am practicing, all towards one goal, with several 'bonus' side effects...

The goal; I want to get to know the instrument on a basic level, and drastically reduce the time it takes to learn new material. Part of the commitment is staying the course...

1) Get to know the neck. Start with the melody side. Flash card 'o' rama on each string every day. Play with the tuner. Arrange tunes. 10-15 minutes every day and whattaya know? Two months later and I am really getting to know the melody side which means one less thing to have to think about when I am playing. Still working on this, it's an ongoing thing that will always be needing some kind of TLC...

2) Bass Side. Relationships. Something Steve A talked about in every lesson. So, I took that to mean that I should work on it. I decided to play in the RH a one octave Major Scale in 8th notes. Now, it's the bass side that's important here, and in the spirit of simplification I started by just playing a root note, straight whole notes, half, quarter, eighths and 16ths with quarter and 8th note triplets. Oh, and transposition is the name of the game; Cycle of 4ths. Then, I escalated to outlining a simple chord progression with roots. Then octaves. Then 5ths, and currently Tenths.
The simple Scale in the RH is also practice as triads over the chord progression. Let me tell you, things are becoming a LOT more automatic. I now have a relationship between bass side key centres to melody side key Center. It's small, and I won't be winning any awards for masterful bass playing, but you can bet that it is a tool in my toolkit that will help me learn and assimilate new information a lot more rapidly. Helping me get to know the neck, too...

3) Rhythm figure. This is where the bass plays a simple, simple motif using quarter notes. First as just quarter note repeating root notes, then as alternating octaves, then as alternating 5ths, then as alternating 5ths outlining a two bar progression with diatonic changes, etc etc. Now, the melody side gets to play a bunch of stuff, all of it designed to take melody side "finger confusion" out of the equation. Intervallic sequences up to 16th notes (2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, and 6ths) some basic scalar sequences, and all of the basic rhythmic permutations. Oh, and a few simple arpeggio sequences, and some single string scalar work, along with a couple of Pentatonic and blues scale ideasAll of this is hammered out in one scale, and one fingering in one key. I will transpose to other fingerings and keys later, this gets me started translating my existing musical vocabulary to this strange new instrument. Improvisation, fretboard knowledge, composition all benefiting from this... I tried doing this sort of thing using triad sequences and stuff in the bass, but alas... I am not ready for it. The "Stick Arpeggio" walking lines, and rhythmically syncopated bass lines will just have to wait until I am warm and fuzzy with playing simple "root note" and "R8va" and "R5" and "R3" type lines.

4) Repertoire. Tunes. The whole reason we do this... Well, you can only play what you are able to play. Every Song I attempted to learn took two weeks to basically learn, and it came with a guarantee of crashing and burning. I don't invest this kind of time and money into something to fall on my face, oh no. I have since taken a different approach to learning tunes. For me, there is 3 steps to learning a tune. 1) learn your parts, and get them ready for basic execution. 2) Pretend you are a 5 year old and distill that fucker to it's most common components. That means simple root notes in the bass, and simple melody in the melody side. Practice until comfortable (No looking...remember?) 3) Revise and refine as you get better. I would rather have 40 plus tunes that are simple, meat and potatoes versions of the songs that I can play perfectly, than one song that I am struggling to play that is at a level far beyond me. Each song learned gives you a sort of "approach" which you can leverage to help you learn the next one. Plus, all that other stuff I am working on explodes through my repertoire, and vice versa. Getting to know the neck...

5)Sight reading. Learning this on this instrument is important to me; I already know the benefits of being able to read well on guitar, and knowing the language is critical; Stafftab and Tabulature is great but being able to read opens up a whole new universe of music at your disposal. For me, I am focused on the melody side with actual notes, and bass side for "the big letters" a la real book. So yeah, I am a beginner here, but besides the tunes I have memorized, there is a good 10-15 out of the real book that I can sightread the head to while playing simple root notes on the bass side. Funny how those little 1 octave scales come in handy for this... I use the Berklee Books 1-3 for my reading practice, and yep I use both hands on the melody side as required. This has really helped me with fretboard knowledge, learning tunes, my independence and again it is one more tool that radically decreases the time it takes for me to learn a tune.


So yes, there is a lot left out. I mean, There is a heap of work to do on the bass side, and I could really focus on some stuff, but no. For now, it's about achieving my goal and gaining an overview. An attainable goal, winning and having fun. There will always be more to learn.

Luck favours the prepared! Haha

So yeah, getting to the point of being able to play walking bass lines is going to take some time. In the meantime, however, I intend to play. Basically, I realized that I simply am not ready just yet for a lot of stuff. There is no doubt in my mind that I will get there, but I really needed to come up with a strategy. Under constant refinement of course... And yeah, when I get some time I will post some evidence...

The folks on this board have been invaluable with their input, very helpful, so thanks...

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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
Walking bass can be solved a lot easier than is being discussed here. Also expressive techniques must be present to make the support musical.
Ready when you are Scott.

Steve Adelson


Sat Jan 02, 2016 12:53 pm
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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
I am in the process of making a video lesson on this subject, it is easier to show than write about. And I have some personal insights into walking and independence which I hope will help folks deepen understanding. Great thread

Brett


Sat Jan 02, 2016 1:02 pm
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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
I know a lot of these techniques you're talking about. In fact, I think I'm a natural bass player who played guitar his whole life. When I play bass again everything is so natural for me. To play a chromatic or double chromatic approach is so normal that I don't even think about it...I just play it. Why I played guitar my whole life? Honestly...I don't know. It gave me solid skills in harmony I guess. Nice post.

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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
It's a great thread! And it's nice that two guys who know how to do it have posted. I'm looking forward to checking out your stuff, Brett. Also, I'd like to apologize for that previous post. I should just shut my pie-hole... But nahh... It's fun to talk about this stuff, and the replies are interesting.

By no means am I suggesting a "how to gain independence" or a "this is how you learn to do walking bass" kind of thing, but rather I identified serious weaknesses in my current abilities that needed fixing. Maybe my methods will give someone an idea, maybe not. Whatever. The reality is that although it seems like I am doing a lot of hard work, I am not. I am learning simple motifs and gradually escalating the duration and complexity so that I no longer waste anyone's time, or my money at a lesson or a jam, whatever... Also, I was at a point where I was ready to ditch this instrument due to feeling like I was moving backwards, or in circles, whatever... Banging my head up against a wall with very, very small and slow results... Stupid music Student! lol And Steve, your lessons were CRITICAL to me learning how to approach this monster. I think I need some time to digest and explore... No worries, you have a lifelong customer, I think you are an amazing teacher saddled with a confused retard as a student. Will some time fix that? Hmmmn hard to say... But I have made advancements. Lots of 'em... and one day, early next year I will be doing walking bass and all that stuff. Not at your guys' level, but it will be lightyears ahead of where I am at currently... And, it will come with some confidence and comfort...

Walking bass is easy? lol Jeepers. Only for you guys... And only if you have some previous knowledge that you can leverage I think... If one is uncomfortable playing in 10ths, or 5ths, or even octaves or plain root notes while having a melody over top how is doing a walk (Arpeggio with passing tones basically...) easy? One still has to make musical decisions... one still needs to know the chord progression... and one still needs to be able to know the notes on the neck (both sides) in order to do any of these things... And then there is the simultaneous nature of the instrument... Yeah, I think that there are some holes that need to be filled before I am ready to plant a garden! heh Turnips await...

So for me, I think that a good year or two of heavy preparation before I embark on studying with anyone; I think you guys are way more advanced than you realize. heh Also, I may be a little stupider than your average Stick guy...

Thanks for your help, guys!

Walking bass for absolute noobs volume 1? This will be a book? hahaha 3 easy steps or less? No intervallic, scalar or rhythmic knowledge required? hahahaha I can't wait...

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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
Scott,
there is a lot to be said about the Root on beat one. This assumes one chord per 4 beats. If you have a ii V7 progression going on, like Dm to G7 Key of C, then a real easy way to play them
is like this beats 1 -d 2 [up to]-f 3 [up to]-g 4 [down to]-c# (below the d you started on)
and rinse and repeat ! yes, populous the c# is a b5 but hey, its a passing tone and adds movement and color otherwise you are just doubling the d and you can watch the backs of your audience as they are "walking" out the door!

Think of it as a big connect the dots and the dots are the chords. play the root of the chord and work your way in an even fashion ie. 4 beats then root + next notes (whatever) to get to the root of the next chord. that's it. For right now. Yes, I know modern playing moves through the shapes , circle of 5ths, and sometimes hits on the third or fifth on 1, but if you are paid to lay the bottom down or more importantly your listeners, lay it down so people know where they are at least on 1.

No matter what Stick tuning you are in , the Bass in in Root, and reversed 5ths, so right across the fret are your fifths, EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW THEIR NAMES.

on learning the notes, plug your tuner in your bass side and keep it ON. when you play, if you are reasonably in tune, it will tell you the note you are playing. The other best thing to do that I teach, is learn all the natural notes on the two fattest strings. D -E -F- G then A-B-C-D.
Daniel is absolutely right- you go too high, IMHO you are out of the bass range and into the melody side. Any note you need will be 'around" those natural notes ie. Eb- 1 fret lower than E, C#- 1 fret higher than C.

hope this helps,
Dave B "DBro"


Sat Jan 02, 2016 2:57 pm
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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
Don't get down on yourself. You had a GREAT point earlier. I mean one of the greatest I have ever seen on the sight. The "splitting the atom" thing. Yes yes yes. Unless ever song is arranged the same boring way, it's gonna be a bit like this. But that is true for piano as well so it's GOOD to reinvent the wheel as much as you can with each new tune, YES YES YES THE MORE YOU PLAY THE MORE THE CARRYOVER but if your goal is playing ANYTHING with independence it's gonna take a lifetime. You are an excellent musician on a new instrument you'll get there if the desire maintains. But you have the right ideas no shortcuts (sorry) gotta practice with foresight meaning have goals decide what it will take and go for it.

One suggestion is repeated notes in both hands. Gotta get that going early or else bad habits form and playing is limited. Greg is the guru on this. Gotta shed it.

So believe me if music ain't humbling you every day you're not trying hard enough.

Just my 2 cents

Great thread


Sat Jan 02, 2016 3:14 pm
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Post Re: learning the walking bass - infinite backwards regressio
Hi Rodan.

I love working from this book.

It occurred to me that trying to learn the Stick at least in part, from the point of view of reading jazz piano books, makes for a very steep learning curve. Taking direction from Friedland's book and I've resolved to keep the right hand chord voicing in simple form while focussing on the bass line.

This set me free.

I too found that note recognition has become a lot easier and that I'm getting across the touch board a lot more easily. I can slowly sight read all bass lines up to about half way through the book. Very encouraging.

I also share the same goal of being able to confidently read Real Book arrangements and to be able to read/perform these at least in a relatively simple but confident way.

Thanks for the further inspiration to stay on this track.

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