The Anatomy Of A Bass Line

So what you gotta do is first of all find a root, then try the third, because the next thing you want to know is major or minor, and if neither third really works, then it's probably not the right root note. So you can go through a process of elimination that way. But then, what I did, once I found the G, and I tried, I went to a triad voicing that sounds like what he's playing on the keyboard, right? So I was thinking, okay, well, the next thing to do is listen to your, uh, I call it the groove denominator. Yeah. In other words, listen to what the bass and drums are doing, and start off, remember how we did that band-to-pocket thing, to where we found just the simplest thing we could do, and just played that all the way through the song? That's what you want to do with this, you know, before you start adding other stuff. All right, so I'll play with that a minute, just get that groove down, done, just really get that groove going, you know, because when we add stuff, we don't necessarily want to be too cloudy, you know, or have too much, because what you got to remember, in situations like this, there's probably going to be more than that keyboard and drum on this when he's done with it. So a lot of the space that you're hearing is not for you, you know. So you want to leave space for stuff that you don't know that's going to be there yet, you know. So it's better to be a little bit more sparse, rather than be too busy, just because the space seems to allow it for what you're hearing, right? All right, so the next thing is, like, to work thirds and fifths, and since we've established some major triad, you know, major pentatonic is going to be the main core of your note choice here. So one, three, five, and six, because generally working with a major triad, you know, type of voicing like this, generally a major pentatonic is going to be the, you know, scale of choice to pick from. Yeah, that's the one I was doing on this thing, something like that. Yeah, but what you want to do is you want to work your other note choices in around that, that's your core, that's what kind of needs to be there, right? Everything else is going to be like embellishment and frills and connection, so you don't want to interfere with that core, you want to kind of come up with something that's going to be kind of lyrical too. Five, six, and one. Now I'm trying to slide, get a slide thing happening, I'm not sure if it's gonna work yet, but I'm kind of, you know, a little bit of a slide kind of thing there, to get a little bit of lyricism, a lyrical quality to the bass line. So, so I think I'm finally, I started just using the six, and I really wasn't using much of the three, and I wasn't getting anywhere with it. So, well, that, I like that better. Boop. So with this now, I've kind of getting an idea, kind of starting to formulate, I want to phrase it right. So instead of doing, don't, like, having a one, two, three, instead of the same thing repeating every time, like, right, I phrase it, and, uh, make two of those things one, kind of phrase it, it's kind of like the conclusion of it, that make sense? Do, pretty cool. See how we kind of developed a thematic kind of bass line, and where are we, exactly what he's looking for, and where did we start? That all grew from there, see. But it maintains its solid, supportive groove format, because we based it off the core. So always find your groove denominator, denominator, which means the simplest thing you can do with the root note for the song to survive. You.