Beginners’ Lesson

Welcome! For the last couple of months we’ve been looking at how interval patterns can help us explore the range of notes available to us in any key. Starting on the root of the major scale and then of the minor scale, we’ve looked at a number of ways of building riffs and lines playing the notes in a different order, while still keeping a focus on the root so we know what we’re coming back to.

The job of the bassist, more often than not, requires us to play the bottom note of the chord on beat one. This can either be the root, or in the case of slash chords, whatever note is to the right of the slash—for example, C/E is a C Major chord but with an E in the bass. So these exercises are about keeping our reference point in place while branching out and trying some new intervals and new tonal possibilities, while staying in the key.

This month, we’re going to apply those kinds of shapes to a chord progression and see what happens when we’re still playing in one key, but the chords are moving around. What