Originally published May 16, 2014, lightly edited for clarity.
One thing I spent a lot of time practicing years ago were exercises of all different types. Looking back, I would have liked to have had more of a balance between practicing exercises and practicing playing music. Having experienced the downside of too much exercise practice, I would like to suggest to those students of music that you do not neglect the quality time of practicing playing music, meaning that one should spend time applying what is learned from the exercise to musical material. That being said here is the 1st of a note grouping exercise, “Groups Of 2 In Triplets” that falls into a category I call “Raw Lick Material”. Enjoy, and don’t forget to throw down a groove before you put it away. Phrasing vocabulary is one of the fundamentals I teach. For personalized coaching on vocabulary-building, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
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All right, well, this raw lick material is just that, this stuff I'm going to show you, you want to do it enough just to get familiar with the idea of the movement, and then apply it to your choices. In other words, you don't want to exercise this stuff to death, because if you always just play exercises, you'll never get around to playing music. So you do it just enough to understand the exercise, and then it's important to actually practice this in the context of making up lines or solos or whatever you're doing. A lot of this stuff is going to fit more of like a solo or fill kind of thing, as opposed to bass line things.
Good, I kind of need some of that a little bit. So let's take the G sharp box of the major scale, because it's the easiest box to remember. All right, so it's going to start on the G sharp, it's going to be one, two, four fingering, one, two, four fingering, one, three, four fingering, one, three, four. Now, note function really isn't important here, it's just really how you're organizing the notes within the shape, although in an application sense you'll get back to the note function, but that's going to depend on how you're applying it to the chord. So, for the exercise format, it doesn't matter, think of it just as a one, two, four, one, two, four, one, three, four, one, three, four fingering, a group of notes.
All right, the first thing is called groups of two and triplets. What you do is you start on the second note of the box, and you go down to the first note, and then back to the second again. So on each note, starting on the second note of the box, you go three notes like that, then you go up to the next note of the box from that starting point. And so the whole exercise would be, and just count one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three as you do it, because it'll be in a three grouping, kind of a triplet feel.
Yeah, it could be. Now there's different things you could do with it, but let's start off there. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. So if you're playing a line, you could do different combinations of those types of things. So that's really cool, groups of two and triplet grouping.
Now, you don't have to stop at the top to reverse, when you get up, like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, we do this one, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, just go straight back down.
All right, now the next one, that's groups of two and triplets. All right, the next one's groups of two and eighth notes. So basically what you do is you just take out the third note of what you just did, so just start on the same place, but go one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. Now, in this one you will repeat that note, the C sharp note, the third finger note, to reverse direction. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. Just groups of two and eighth notes, that's why I call it raw lick material, you plug in little snippets of it in different places, just a movement within the notes that you can apply to any choices. Now the groups of two will work pretty well with the pentatonics as well, I mean if you were going...
