Originally published March 26, 2015, lightly edited for clarity.
Knowing your different options on how to handle notes that cause tension against a chord sound can be a little tricky and confusing at first. The first important thing is to get to not being afraid of using these notes by getting to know them. I recommend doing this by practicing playing these notes a lot with the chord and getting used to the way they sound. The next thing is get to know the ones you can land on and stay awhile versus the ones that only really work well as connectors. These choices are always going to be affected and influenced by the way you use them rhythmically. Rhythm and groove is always going to be the deal breaker in whether something is going to sound good or not. The following video demonstrates how to handle dissonant notes on chord sounds. Harmony is one of the fundamentals I teach. If you want hands-on guidance working with tension and resolution, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
Read the transcript
All right, uh, the answer I'm looking for here is that they're the natural clash notes of the scale. Clash notes, yeah, they're the notes that cause dissonance against a chord sound. Dissonance, okay, all right, in other words, tension, or another way to put it is they don't sound as good. They don't sound as good as the other notes. When you play a four or seven, it's looking for resolve someplace else, usually.
Now, if I put up my scales audio, all right, now I'm going to put up the major scale chord sound here. Can you hear this? Yes. Is that too loud? No, no, that's fine. Now, if I play the notes of the major scale, listen to how they sound against the chord. There's one, sounds fine, right? Two, three, so far they're all consonant, right, that's fine. But listen to four. Oh, yeah, sounds like a wrong note. Does it? It does, yeah. Should be, play, then five. Okay, six, seven, you hear a little bit of a sting there too, but it's not as bad. Not bad. Four, yeah. And then back to one, right?
So seven and four are the natural clash notes of the scale, because what happens is a four is clashing a half step above the three in the chord voicing. See, I've got three there, and I got four, right, four against the third, four, right. Now, if I've got seven, it's clashing against a one from a half step below. But when I put in the other notes, it sounds good. It does, yeah, that sounds very harmonic.
Now, the thing is, the ear, for whatever reason, likes a half step below clash a lot better than it does a half step above. Half step above clashes, meaning a note a half step above a chord tone, right, is always going to be more abrasive than a half step below. Well, that's interesting, I never knew that. Never thought so.
So when you're doing bass lines, that's important to know, because anytime you approach a note from a half step above, it's always going to sting more. All right, so, uh, if you're moving in a very slow tempo song, half step above approaches aren't very good. In fact, generally half step approaches, they work well sometimes, but usually the rule of thumb with half step approaches to a chord tone is that you do a half step below, diatonic above. Now, diatonic means within the scale, so meaning using a scale tone above and half step below approaches generally work better in connecting notes of a bass line. So a little bit of information to file away there, right? So that when you approach a chord tone, it's going to sound better if you want to do it from a half step, that half step's always going to work better from a half step below. It's always going to cause less distance. Half steps above are always more abrasive. So sometimes those aren't good choices, especially on a slow tune. Mm-hmm, because it just sits there and stings too long. Mm, mm-hmm.
