In this lesson, you will learn how to combine chords with a walking bass line, a concept that is becoming more and more in demand these days. As club and restaurant owners are cutting budgets, one way to keep our gig as a guitar player is to slim down the ensemble to a duo or solo.
A walking bass line walks through the chord progression, one note per beat. Its function is to outline the chords of the progression and provide a smooth transition from one chord to another.
While walking bass in a band is generally played by the bass guitar or double bass player, being able to play walking bass lines is an essential skill for jazz guitarists when playing without a bass player.
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Walking bass on guitar is usually played fingerstyle. Use your thumb for the bass notes and your other fingers to comp the chords.
Being able to walk a bass line and comp the chords at the same time is an invaluable skill to have and one that will allow you to work in situations where other guitarists cannot.
The very start in learning how to walk a bass line is being able to play the root note of each chord on the lowest two strings (A and E strings) of the guitar.
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In the next step of constructing walking bass lines, we will play what bass players refer to as half time, where the half note is the rhythmic focus of the line.
Notice that we now have a rhythmic change in the last two bars. Because the chord movement is twice as fast in these two bars we have to use quarter notes when adding our approach tones.
This leads us nicely into step 3 which will deal with what bass players refer to as walking time, where the quarter note is now the focus of the line.
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Now that we have introduced a quarter note pulse in the last two measures of example 2 we can now “walk” a bass line through the entire blues progression.
Shell chords are a type of voicing that is often used in walking bass lines, but drop 2 and drop 3 chords are used as well.
The chord voicings will often appear on the “and” of the first beat (bar 1 and 2), but also on the first beat (bar 3), or the “and” of the third beat (bar 4).
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This is a common rhythmic choice for guitarists who walk and comp at the same time, but again once you have this idea down feel free to put the chord in any part of the bar.
Instead of playing two bars of Bb7 or one bar of Bb7 and one bar of B°7, I play a descending chord progression: Bb7 to Ab7 to G7 to C7.
The chromatic descending line of 13th chords that starts in bar 23 is also the result of a series of tritone substitutions on the normal turnaround.
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Now we are ready to take these same steps and apply them to any jazz tune, be it a blues tune or standard 32 bar tune such as Autumn Leaves. You might want to try writing out the steps when first applying them to other tunes, and once you are proficient at writing them out try and walk/comp on the fly.
Being able to create walking basslines and fill them in with chords on the spot is a great skill to have and will definitely make you (as a guitarist) more desirable in a solo or duo situation.In this week’s lesson we’re looking at a very simple walking bass line through the chord changes of the Jazz standard Autumn Leaves. We’re going to use basic chord tones and repetitive lines that will act as a springboard in developing your own lines.
As I mentioned this is a very simple line using only a couple of basic repeating melodic patterns. Once you have those patterns under your fingers you can start to experiment and add more and more figures on the fly as your vocabulary develops.
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So first of all let’s just briefly look at the tune. Autumn Leaves is one of the most commonly used songs when it comes to learning jazz and with any jazz standard, it’s worth looking at the harmony and getting a feel for what’s going on in terms of basic chord sequences and key changes.
Autumn Leaves is pretty straightforward in that we have two main tonal centers, one in Bb major and then another in the relative minor key of G minor.
The Ebmaj7 helps to pivot between the two keys because it’s chord IV of Bb Major and chord VI of G Minor:
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At the end of the 8 bars we have G7 chord acting as a secondary dominant chord to bring us back round to Cm7 again:
If you’re wondering what I mean by all these numbers, we’re looking at the chords in a key. Just follow work through the Music Theory For Bass series of lessons in the Lesson Map to learn more.
For this walking bass line I’m going to use only two scale patterns as the foundation for the whole thing. There are a couple of exceptions as you’ll see but for the most part we’re looking at one line for ascending and one line for descending.
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These two patterns work for any chord movement by 4th. When measuring chord movement we look at the root movement in ascent. So Cm7 to F7 is movement by 4th because we have the root notes moving from C to F.
This is the pattern of scale degrees 1 2 3 5 applied to the C Dorian scale. We use the Dorian scale because it’s the appropriate scale for this chord. We’re in the key of Bb Major so Cm7 is the second chord in the key. We match this to the second mode of the key, which is Dorian. To learn more about chords and scales within a key be sure to watch the Chords Within A Key lesson and the Modes Of The Major Scale lesson.
For the descending line I come down through the appropriate scale. If we look at the Bbmaj7 I descend through the notes of the Bb major scale. This leads us smoothly into the next chord of Ebmaj7.
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The two scale patterns work through most of the chords in Autumn Leaves because there is so much movement by 4th. However there are a few basic exceptions.
In bars 7-8, we have the same root note over two bars (Gm7-G7) so I’ve opted to simply descend through the arpeggio on the first bar and then use our 1-2-3-5 line for the second bar:
In bar 16 we also have Gm7 moving to Am7b5. This is movement of a 2nd so we need another line. I opted to use a basic chromatic approach:
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In bars 27-28 we have 4 chords lasting 2 beats each. In this instance, we can simply repeat each root note, giving us a smooth descending line:
Finally in bar 30 we have another 2 chords in the bar. This time we have wider movement by 4th so we can use root – 3rd patterns to bridge the larger gaps:
Learn to play the walking bass line provided and always focus on how each line works over each chord. You are making a journey from one chord to the next and using the chord tones and scales, implied by the harmony, as your resources in building a road through the terrain.
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Even though we’re actually memorizing a line and looking at repetitive scale patterns, the aim should be to improvise your walking line and have the freedom to move around the fretboard with complete confidence.
So as a quick example of how you might use this bass line as a springboard. Let’s look at adding one more pattern into the mix. This is a really popular chromatic line that works equally well over minor 7, dominant 7 and major 7 chords. Let’s use our opening Cm7 as the example:
So this line gives us a formula of root note – 2nd – minor 3rd – major 3rd. As with our previous scale patterns we can simply add this into our line wherever we have movement by 4th.
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As you develop your walking bass line skills and vocabulary, you’ll begin to find many different ways of moving from one chord to the next, regardless of the intervallic distance.
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