My Latest Article Up At BassMusicianMagazine.com
Howdy, folks! My new article is finally up and running at Bass-Musician-Magazine.com.
This latest installment deals with the improvising using chord tones. As a practice shed tactic, chord tone exercises are an important part of learning how to navigate harmony. In the context of learning to improvise over chord progressions, they can help you to effectively outline the changes whether or not you have accompaniment ‘assisting’ you. Included in this lesson are some arpeggio inversion exercises that are designed to help you recognize and navigate chord tones over the entire range of your fingerboard. Below is a short excerpt from the article… The complete lesson can be viewed HERE.
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A lot of bass players are intimidated by the idea of improvising over chord changes. Although it would be beyond the scope of a single installment to present a complete and comprehensive guide to improvisation, I wanted to try and shed some light on some simple concepts that you can work on to improve your soloing. In subsequent columns, I’ll elaborate on these some more and demonstrate more of their application.
For any improviser, it is essential to have a working knowledge of chords. Chords are the building blocks of harmony, and they essentially act as ’signposts’ that help an improviser to navigate through a chart. Most of us who have experience playing improvised walking bass lines or solos probably have at the very least assembled and memorized a collection of scale forms or patterns that we have used to play over particular chord types. Scales can be useful in the creation of musical phrases, but for any improviser is very important to have a thorough and complete understanding of chord tones and how to find them on the fingerboard.
A true test of whether or not a player can improvise effectively is to see if they can outline the changes for the listener without having any accompaniment playing underneath them, whatsoever. If you can outline the changes and harmony of a tune using nothing but your bass, then you probably are on the right track to further developing your improvised voice. It is very difficult to do this relying on scales alone… Take for example, a common 4 bar ii-V-I progression. For this example, let’s use the key of F major:
G min7 – C 7 – F maj7 – F maj7
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To view the entire article click HERE.
Copyright 2009, Adam J. Nitti
