CHROMATIC NOTES EXPLORED

Hello again, and welcome back for another month on the Bass Player dojo! This month, we’re going to extend last month’s exercises to the natural minor scale, and then look at some ways to introduce chromatic notes—which are notes from outside the scale—into the patterns we’re forming.

Let’s start with the natural minor version of the main exercise from last month, starting on A and going up in groups of two, three, four notes and so on. In Exercise 1, we start the pattern on our first finger on the 5th fret of the E string, and that’s the note we come back to each time. The other notes can be played ‘one finger per fret’ across the next four frets, or we can use our little finger for the notes on frets 7 and 8 and brace them with our ring finger if pressing the strings down feels too hard or too big of a stretch.

On the subject of stretching, unless the music is so fast that there’s no time for it, pivoting on your thumb as an anchor and