EXPLORE CHORD SWAPPING

When you change the bass note, the role of each note in the chord will shift in relation to that note

Hello again! Following on from our look at swapping out the bass note to change the chord in the last issue, we’re going to take a look at how this enables us to liven up otherwise simple and repetitive chord progressions. These are methods that crop up all over popular music, and will help your songwriting skills to develop, as well as your bass playing.

Let’s take another look at our notes in a major key arranged in a circle, as seen in Figure 1 to our right. Remember that we built triads and then added extensions—7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths—to those chords by just ‘following the star’ in the diagram, and then we looked at the way that the bass note defines the nature of the entire chord. If we change our bass note, the whole chord and its function will change. That’s our harmonic superpower!

So, if we have a chord progression that’s fairly repetitive, for example a I, IV, V progression, which is C, F, G in the