MASTER THE MAJOR SCALE

Welcome back! This month, we’re going to dip back into theory. Learning bass is a constant rotation of the three aspects of how we understand and execute any musical idea—what it sounds like, what it looks like on the fingerboard, and how we explain it via music theory. Technical exercises are a combination of all three, as are composition and improvisation.

These three ways into any piece of music can help us out if we get stuck with any one approach. If we can hear it but don’t understand what’s happening theoretically, we might have more chance once we’ve worked out the pattern on the fingerboard. Alternatively, if we know that a piece is in the key of D, that might give us a starting-point for working out the notes available to us on the fingerboard of our instrument, and our ear will let us know pretty quickly when we step out of the pattern we’re trying to find.

So each time we explore a technical exercise, we need to step away from it and work out what the implications are for our understanding