GETTING FUNKY – PART 3
Welcome! For part three of our look at how to bring more of a funk feel to our bass-lines, we’re going to look at the role of chromatic lines in creating the sound that we most commonly associate with funk. These are ideas that transfer into a lot of other situations, so once you’ve learned them with an emphasis on funk, you can then experiment with where else they fit. Harmonic ideas are often a lot more resilient to a change of context than we imagine. We learn a lot of ‘rules’ about how things are meant to be played, but progress in all styles has always happened because people pushed at the edges of what was previously thought to be ‘the way to do things’. So feel free to experiment with all these ideas!
The word ‘chromatic’ means relating to all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Our usage is that we will be exploring short sections of the chromatic scale—three or four adjacent semitones—to act as the connective tissue within the notes of a given chord.
We’re also going to introduce some new
