Making your own basslines

Now, when making basslines you can either make a bassline and then other musicians add to this, or you have a guitar chord progression or riff and then you add to this by playing something that fits underneath this. If you are playing to a chord progression it would be best to play bass arpeggios underneath, but for a guitar riff you would be playing something in the same key that would fit underneath. E.g. if a guitarist plays a riff in C major then you would use the C major scale to make a bassline up.

If you made a bassline from scratch you would pick a key you wanted, then you would use the notes which are contained in the key to make your bassline.

Improvising

Improvising is being able to play something that is unrehearsed and what fits over what someone else is playing, basically you would make something up on the spot, but it has to be in the correct key of the other musicians that are playing.

Tabbing other basslines

If you wish to tab your favourite songs bassline then it will help if you know what key the song is in. Knowing the key enables you to eliminate the notes that will and won’t fit when trying to figure the notes out. Learning notes by ear will also help with this process; use the bass tuner to help you.


Learning bass scales

Like in the bass arpeggios section I will include everything on this page arther than repeat myself on every page.

To successfuly learn scales and how they sound in conjunction to other scales is is best to play the scale downwards one note at a time, then play the scale back up.