Originally published June 11, 2013, lightly edited for clarity.
Adding harmony to a bass line comes down to listening — to the chord, to the groove, and to what else the music needs. As with my last post, I would like to chat about things I like to think about when coming up with a bass line. First and foremost, please listen. It seems that people are so in a hurry to play something that they forget to, or choose not to listen to how their bass line is supporting or not, the other instruments and what they are playing. Besides basic note and rhythm choices, there are the forgotten worlds of note duration, articulation, tone, space, and dynamics. (I am deliberately leaving groove out for now as it should be a given that you should always be in the groove before you start playing and that the before mentioned elements will help make or break the groove depending on how they are applied to the bass line.) Even the simplest bass line can have multitudes of different little things that you can add to it or subtract from it. I think an important part of practicing should be to come up with a bass line over something and then practice changing and rearranging the elements like note duration, articulation, tone, space, and dynamics and get used to being very aware of them and how they affect a line and each other. The following video looks into coming up with a bass line over a rhythm track and, by listening to the track, figuring out how to construct the line. Bass-line construction is one of the fundamentals I teach. For personalized feedback on your own bass lines, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
