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Learning harmony for bass players


JPBass

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Bring the harmony back to Harmony Central! When studying harmony it's cool to think in terms of a center point with everything revolving around that center point (tonic) having a vibe, a name, a connection to the center. We as musicians learn how to hear music, codifying it, relating it to a key, a scale, a mode, a shape ((ie.blues riff).. So are there any questions or study habits that folks want to talk about? Love working with harmony.. As a student, and we are all students, it's fun dissecting music. Figuring it out and charting it either on paper or by ear. Bass players must develop their ears to become sound citizens in an ensemble. Let's too not forget rhythm and groove. While studying harmony it's cool and necessary to keep the groove and rhythmic pocket in tact.. Now you have a healthy practice routine.

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DeepEnd, I hear ya...that's cool thinking the instrumental role of what's goin on in the ensemble depending on what instrument is in your hand. I play piano and bass. When playing piano or keyboards, I assume notes other than the root, assuming the bass player will be on the root. However, there are chord inversions, where the bass might play the 3rd or the 5th..there are other notes as well which sound cool. There is a consequence to every note or tonality that is played by everyone. The C major chord has a root 3rd and 5th; the C E and G...to change to a C minor, the 3rd is lowered a half step to Eb. When playing bass, I like staying on the root, and letting some other instrument in the ensemble take the voice of the 3rd. Consequently there is movement in one voice and the root stays constant. This coincides with the study of counterpoint and moving voices within music. Thanks for bringing up the quality and ingredients of a major triad!! Major is bright sounding vs. minor being more dark, somber...

Harmony and the study of notes used corresponding to the emotional content of a piece of music is intriguing. Groove on!

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I'm definitely a "when in doubt, play the root" guy but sometimes an inversion just sounds--well--right. For example, a D with a B minor (B D F#). There's also the matter of what the melody note is. Our praise band plays one song that starts with an A chord but when I'm playing guitar I play an A6 because the melody note is an F#. It's not fancy but I think it adds a certain touch. I sometimes do something similar on bass. I don't know anywhere near enough theory to explain it, I just know what "sounds right."

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That's cool on the A6th chord how you match the vocal. In terms of basslines, they form in shapes. You can play the root and lock in with the kick drum pattern. Another option has the bass playing a shape, a melodic line. 1165, AA F#E for example..referring to the notes from the key of A major...then think what register (octave) you want to play your shape, your line. You can go up to the 6 5 the F# E, or down low so the E is the open E string which always sounds strong! This has a vibe, and when you attach a vibe, a flavor to your basslines, now you have a motif, a lick, an idea. Repetition is a common and effective compositional tool for bass. Use theory to help your ear evaluate what sounds good to you. This is all subjective, your taste, your likes and dislikes. Keep messing around with guitar and bass, slowly adding theoretical names and devices to your lines and musical motifs. Your lexicon will grow, and you will gain confidence in your growing musicianship skill set. Thanks DeepEnd for chiming in here.. Cool stuff!

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I've played bass and guitar professionally all my life. The focal point of a bass player playing live is different then that of say a guitarist or keyboardist. Your focus playing bass is half musical and half percussion. You lock your playing to the drummer and follow or lead his playing to work as a tightly locked unit.

 

If you have a Rhythm player he may be in there too but its mainly bass and drums that drive the rest of the music. When playing bass properly you may not even hear what the higher frequencies are doing and in many cases loosing your concentration on keeping the tempo locked can lead the bass players attention astray to where you have two un-unified parts going on. The worst thing a bassist can do is follow a guitarist because they may play chords and do riffs that do not match the bass part and only lead the bassist down a rabbit trail, away from the drummers kick and snare and then the band looses it unified kick.

 

Much of this does depend on the musical arrangement of course and there's nothing wrong with the bass player leaving the reservation and doing some improve work but he should get back to a lock when the critical breaks and bridges come in so there isn't a big hole left in his absence.

 

For a guitarist, even a rhythm guitarist, they usually ride above the lows, not only with higher notes, but with a focus on an up front approach to hearing and performing. They are more likely to hear the vocals and the band in its entirety as an orchestra leader would. They may not hear every single note, only those that mix the mark and stick out badly. Their focus my turn more inward when they walk and chew gum at the same time singing and playing, but jumping to leads is all about riding on the surface and if that surface isn't well groomed, he can easily fumble and tumble into anarchy.

 

I've worked with many great and poor bass players as a guitarist. The ones who lock with the drums are the ones you can count on to keep the beat so your leads and timing on breaks is predictable. Guitarists often use time shifting playing leads much like you'd rev an engine up and down. These speed changes often resolve themselves at cut time or double time depending on the resolve of the lead being played.

 

If you have an amateur bass player who hasn't trained himself to lock with the drummer and is sitting there watching you as a spectator does, he's going to loose focus and get all screwed up when you start morphing your note timing playing leads and wind up in a train wreak. I find it very difficult to play with amateur bass players exactly for this reason. I did have more patience for poor players when I was younger but it did hold me back as a guitarist. When you have a rock solid player, not necessarily great player, just someone who can keep a lock with the drummer and have consistent dynamics, you can hang ten on the front of the stage playing your ass off and know the beat will be there. When you're playing 32nd or 64th notes you aren't hearing the individual notes, you're presenting musical phrases that are critically timed and there's no room for the backing tempo to be drifting all over the place because the drummer and bassist cant join at the hip.

 

As a Bassist, Playing pro, there's several things you do to pull off a great show besides playing the notes or sticking by the arrangement. The drummers skill is the key to a bassists ability to improvise. A drummer is often a risk taker. He will follow the lead of the front men when it comes to specific timing on breaks and riffs and he's the one who rules the actual resolve of those breaks and fills. If the drummer is locked in a basic beat, a bass player would look stupid running some improvised riffs. However when a drummer does a fill across his toms, that opens the door for a bassist to run a riff using extra notes that's not planned in advance. Its where the bass player actually gets to have some fun and show off his skill as a player. Higher tomes on the drums allows higher notes on the bass without creating a hole in the musical flow.

 

Once a Bassist does lock with the drummer and has that focus established with the drummer he can step up to the front of the stage and even take the lead role and sing lead or harmonies. His focus will still need to remain unified with the drummer. If he looses that its going to leave the drummer dangling out there on his own and only bad things can happen if that goes on too long. If anything it makes the and sound weak.

 

Time and practice is critical to really nailing things down. I have a drummer I've played both guitar and bass with in bands for over 18 years. We are able to read each others minds when it comes to playing and pull off just about anything either of us can imagine. I can read his mind when he's getting ready to break and follow his lead and vice versa. We've gotten so tight as players we have few problems playing an entire piece of music after having only heard it played once.

 

All this comes from a lifetime of playing with many musicians. You cant even begin to understand many of these things if you don't work with other musicians. You can know every note and riff written and it still comes down to working with others to make those notes heard. There is a balance too between individual learning and group learning. You have to go beyond what you do with a band and continue to feed your own interests, learning music you may never play with that band, but its something you do and an individual to keep your interest in music alive.

 

I cant count the number of musicians who fail to do this. They get in a band, and learn the music but they soon become board and drop out. They loose that hunger to learn and no longer have that "eye of the tiger" winners have and their interdependence with other players in a band is like a gorilla on their back.

 

As a soloist who does home recording or music writing there really aren't any bounds to where you can go. In the past 10 years, I play out less and write more then anything else. I love the unpredictability of it. I'll have a drum track and hear a hundred different way I can go with it, or I may have a chord pattern that can be played to a hundred different drum beats all changing the flavor of the music. You may start with one groove and layer a completely different groove as parts are added but when you solo the two sections you hear two independently different parts working together to equal a very different song as a whole. As far as specific notes, harmonies etc, its often what you don't hear that is the loudest theme the listener hears.

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WRGKMC, you bring up excellent points. As a bass teacher, I know that it is important to prioritize, to structure learning into components not unlike the brain has multiple windows open simultaneously. Groove, playing time, hooking up with the drums, the natural rhythm of a tune is priority. along with that, after a while it's incumbent on musicians to develop harmonic sense. Fluency ensues when all components are working well in a healthy flow. Bass players certainly need to study harmony, all while being in tune to their instrumental role. I had a cool discussion with guitarist Pat Metheny about this topic. I asked him if he were to advertise for a bass player, how would the ad read?. He responded this way. " first the bassist must play in tune. Second, they must learn everything they possibly can about harmony, particularly bebop jazz harmony, and not want to play a note of it!" I loved his response. It clearly states that a bassist must develop acumen, wisdom, yet feel strongly about their contribution to the ensemble in a bassists role, playing the lowest voice, assuming the role of a healthy bassist.

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I'll agree with that. My 2 cents I've always had for bassists is, Its the silence between the notes that gives the music its dynamics and transparency. Guitarists are more likely to let notes ring out. Bass not only has to start notes on time but they have to stop them with just as much accuracy, or at least within the decay span of the drums being used. If you let notes ring from one to the next, there is no dead air gap and you reduce the overall dynamics of the rhythm section.

 

Bassists who use picks instead of their fingers would do well to learn to palm mute strings, or choose a bass that doesn't have allot of sustain. I bought a Hofner club bass a few weeks ago (after wanting one for many decades) I quickly understood how McCartney got away with using a pick. The string dynamics on that bass are nearly double a solid body. The notes do hold but the initial attack dies quickly to a much lower level. It also explains why he used so much compression. He would often use several stages of compression throughout the recording process to flatten the dynamics to match the other instruments.

 

Most of that stuff is just technical related. When it gets down to playing the instrument there's no short cut for experience. You play in a band and practice your sets for 6 months then go out and play together for a couple of years together and you're going to know every note of that music. I still know songs I played back in my first band in the early 70's. I play out with new musicians, they scratch their heads and ask, how do you remember all that stuff and the answer is simply having a passion to know as much as you can.

 

While other kids were out playing sports or hanging out doing things, I was the guy woodshedding music till I knew it better then anybody in town. I started doing that when I was 9 and I'm still doing it at 57. If I don't put in a couple of hours workout each night You loose the physical capabilities to play well. You may know what to do in your mind but the hands fail to respond the way you want them too.

 

This is where having some good sets of aerobic hand exercises you can run through is very important. They don't have to sound musically pleasing as much as they need to work every muscle in the hands equally. You can then work on exercises that work the hands and the mind. I really like these. They are like tongue twisters, "peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" except they stump your fingers. They sound easy enough but actually doing them continuously takes both concentration and good dexterity.

 

I've long since use up most of the standard types you'd find and began making up my own exercises myself. Many will focus on specific techniques I need to keep in shape. One may be loaded with pull-offs, another may involve single double or triple string slides as though you're playing slide or a fretless instrument. another may involve a complicated matrix of changing strings while running a scale, across the strings. Some of these are more mathematical maze type exercises then they are ear training.

 

The last one I developed I practiced for nearly a month before it began to come automatically. Then I recorded an original song and while adding the various parts, that riff sneaked in there as smooth as glass. I didn't even realize I played it, it was completely automatic.

 

That's how many parts come about. You may practice material many times and then use elements of one song in another. Over time you may have hundreds of bits an pieces you can glue together at will to express whatever mood that feels or sounds right. That's when you begin to see music as a language, not and exercise. You begin by learning your ABC's, you then learn to use those letter in words, words in sentences, then paragraphs, to stories. Read enough stories and you can eventually begin to make up your own stories. you may start by borrowing common themes, but the really dedicated musicians will go beyond that and create a whole new reality with their music that never existed before.

 

Harmony is only one element out of thousands that need to be there for music to really live. Its an important element and you can get allot of mileage out of focusing on it, but every other element in music can and should have just as much time spent on it whenever possible.

 

Most will develop some favorite elements they use allot in their music. There's nothing wrong with that, just be sure you recognize it as something habitual you use. Like every habit you can wear it out and it can wind up boxing you in. You have to be willing to start over using some other element, and refining it to the same degree as you did the first. This is much like doing a personality makeover. you may keep some of the old but you want to give your audience a new role they can enjoy, just the same as an actor changes roles. If Bogart continued to play gangsters, he would have died as a bad guy without a name. He expanded his roles to include all kinds of different people and became a historic star.

 

Musicians have to do this same thing. When you reach one plateau, The only way to get to that next taller mountain top, is descend to the bottom and start the climb all over again. This is the way of most things in life. You cant build your own mountains. You choose your challenges based on your skill level and when you master that, you take on a bigger challenge. If you choose poorly you can wind up thinking the hill is no challenge at all or the mountain to high for anyone to overcome. Same goes when you're choosing musical material, styles, and elements you want to incorporate in your performance whatever that instrument may be.

 

So my summation is, you got to sweat a little if you want to get better. If you walk off stage calm and collected and your fingers don't ache a little, you likely put everyone to sleep with you're playing and any applause you receive is likely just good manors not the inspired happiness you should be giving people with your playing.

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The point is that you need to be able to play the right note at the right time. I can keep time with or without a drummer so I need to focus on the right note. If I'm playing live on a song I don't know well, I pretty much stick with the root. But if I know it well and especially if I have time to practice on my own in advance, I'll experiment with inversions and the like.

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DeepEnd, how about a "good" note played at a time rhythmically speaking that contributes to the song in your own unique way. We all have different tastes, disparate emotional responses to music situations. Consequently I prefer to think of a good note, that grooves, and adds to the music. As an exercise, experiment with inversions. They are a fabulous compositional device for bass players and anyone in terms of adding to a harmonic equation. Root position refers to a triad being spelled root 3rd 5th. The first inversion, has a beautiful sound where the 3rd is on bottom. First inversion is spelled 3 5 root. A 2nd inversion triad which is another compelling sound has the bottom voice being the 5h of the triad. Take a D major triad..

The 2nd inversion would be spelled from bottom to top; A D F# or 5 1 3....try these out in musical situations. Also study music with a friend, someone who has been working with these triads and inversions to help you associate these sounds with specific songs. Bach certainly used them. However, you can find them used in current music too. On Ed Sheerens current hit song Thinking Out Loud the second chord is a first inversion I major triad. So the key is D major. First chord is D (root position) going to a D maj 1st inversion, meaning the 3rd or F# is on bottom. Listen to it. Hear how the inversion moves the harmony forward, and the D to D/F# sets up the next chord ,the IV chord or G major. With a theoretical backround you can codify and write your music so it can be understood by anyone else who reads or understands basic theory. Check out some instructional materials, books, videos to learn more. Find a good teacher. You'll cherish the knowledge!!

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