Expanding Your Palette: Playing Walking Bass On The Guitar

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EXPANDING YOUR PALETTE

PLAYING WALKING BASS ON THE GUITAR
CHAPTER 1
Guitarists are not usually very

good bass players. Mostly they
play guitar lines on the bass.
But the greatest classic rock
guitar players certainly knew
how to play bass lines on the
guitar. For example, Jimi Hendrixs
Manic Depression is almost
completely composed of bass lines
played on the guitar, and the end of
his solo in Hey Joe consists of bass
lines. For that matter, Led Zeppelins
Black Dog is written from a bass line
developed by John Paul Jones. I could
go on naming examples like these.
Those of us who play guitar and
perform with bassists need to respect
their knowledge of the instrument,
because its something that most of
us dont have. I want to remedy that.
In this chapter of the DVD, Im going
to demonstrate a few simple tricks
that bass players use when they craft
bass lines, and in doing so, help you
dramatically expand your guitar
playing and intuition when it comes
to choosing which notes to play over a
given chord.
In this chapter, Im going to show
you a very simple pattern developed
out of chromatic walking bass
lines, walking meaning the notes
are constantly changing in a steady
rhythm, usually quarter or eighth
notes. If followed diligently, it can
really broaden your palette and show
you how to sound like a bass player
when you play that instrument, rather
than like a guitar player on the wrong
instrument.
Although some bass players,
especially inexperienced young
players or guitarists who pick up the
bass, tend to just pedal the root notes,
great bassists use all sorts of tricks and
walking lines to develop interesting
support for the other musicians, and if
you remove all the other instruments
except the drums and the bass, you
can still hear the song. Were going to
take that approach with the guitar, so
here we go:
First, of course, we have the triads
that contain the root, or tonic (1), the
mediant (3) and the dominant (5)
(FIGURE 1). We can play those three
notes forever, along with the octave.
But we can do more than that.
Between the mediant and the dominant
are the subdominant (4), which lives
3 GUITAR DVD
in the major scale, and the diminished

fifth (f5), the note we add to a minor
pentatonic to yield a hexatonic, or socalled blues scale, which reintroduces
the tritone against the tonic. So from
scale degree 3 we can walk straight
up with our four fingers and play a
chromatic run that contains the 3, 4, f5
and 5 of a given key. The octave is on
the next string, and we can play it by
flattening our pinkie against that string.
Lets assume that were playing not
jazz but rock and roll, which is for the
most part played in the Mixolydian
mode. This mode contains a flatted
seventh degree, or f7, so we can add
that, giving us the standard walking
bass line (FIGURE 2). To that pattern
we can add the submediant (6) and
leading tone (natural 7) as passing
tones. This gives us another four-note
chromatic thread, which ends with
the octave root note of the chord. This
gives us eight notes to work with, and
FIGURE 1 key of A
3fr
5fr
THESE
SIMPLE
TRICKS WILL
HELP YOU
GREATLY
EXPAND
YOUR GUITAR
PLAYING AND
INTUITION.
FIGURE 2 key of A
7fr
3fr
5fr
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3fr
5fr
7fr
9fr
(
12fr
*
&
(
+
(
*
&
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&
FIGURE 4 key of D
3fr
5fr
7fr
+
(
&
*
+
(
+
(
9fr
12fr
&
*
&
*
FIGURE 5 key of A
3fr
5fr
7fr
9fr
(
+
(
*
*
&
12fr
*
&
&
+
(
+
7fr
&
FIGURE 3 key of A
theyre extraordinarily simple to play

because they use all four fingers in
positional play. Plus, you can play them
either up or down. Using chromatic
passing tones between scale degrees 3
and 5 on one string and between 6 and
1 on the next higher string yields the
pattern illustrated in FIGURE 3.
To do the same thing with the IV
and V chords in a I-IV-V progression,
you could either shift the FIGURE
3 pattern up or down the neck or
alternatively stay in the same position
and make a fingering change, using
the pattern shown for the IV chord in
FIGURE 4. For the V chord, use the
same fingering two frets, or one whole
step, higher.
FIGURE 5 shows a big-picture
aerial overview of the two chromatic
walking patterns from FIGURES 3 and
4 transposed to the key of A. Notice
how they take up almost the entire
fretboard.
+
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15fr
+
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h

EXPANDING YOUR PALETTE

Guitarists are not usually very

in the major scale, and the diminished

theyre extraordinarily simple to play

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