GET STARTED! BEGINNING FUNK—PART 2
Hello again! Last month we looked at some of the rhythmic considerations when thinking about funk and introducing a funk feel to our music. This month we’re going to have a look at one of the most common patterns for coming up with funk bass-lines, and how we might apply it.
In the last lesson looking at rhythm, the notes we chose to outline those rhythms were taken from the minor pentatonic scale. This is one of the most commonly used patterns in all of popular music for bass parts. Today, we’re going to add two more notes to it. This will bring us up to seven notes—remember, a pentatonic scale has five—and so will match the number of notes in a diatonic major or minor scale. Diatonic just means ‘relating to one key’. However, the sequence of notes, while following the same template as the Major scale, is going to start and end on the second degree of the scale, rather than the first. Let’s look at how that works.
