Jazz guitar walking bass pdf

Terms of Service. If you are playing a walking bass line on guitar, it means that there is no bass player. So your role is now to hold the fort down by playing those roots while others solo. In other words, it is your responsibility to anchor the harmony. Not doing so, on at least most of the chord changes, will result in harmonic chaos. That is, if you play other notes on that first downbeat, especially on a low register such as the 6th string, you will imply a different chord which may or may not work in relation to what the soloist is playing.

Always play the root, either on the 6th or 5th string. Other than the fact that we want to you use the lowest acceptable register available, this simply means that all our chords will be in root position, at least when played on the initial down beat.

Use smooth voice leading at the point of chord transition. Because the chord movement is twice as fast in these two bars we have to use quarter notes when adding our approach tones. This leads us nicely into step 3 which will deal with what bass players refer to as walking time, where the quarter note is now the focus of the line. Shell chords are a type of voicing that is often used in walking bass lines, but drop 2 and drop 3 chords are used as well.

Here are some easy-to-grab chord voicings that we will be using:. Now that we have the bass line and the chords under our fingers it is time to bring them both together. This is a common rhythmic choice for guitarists who walk and comp at the same time, but again once you have this idea down feel free to put the chord in any part of the bar. Adding a sus chord before a dominant chord is an effective way to create more movement in your chord voicings.

Gb7 is the tritone substitute of C7 and is another way to create movement in the chord progression. The chromatic descending line of 13th chords that starts in bar 23 is also the result of a series of tritone substitutions on the normal turnaround.

Here is a series of walking bass line patterns ordered by chord type major, minor, dominant, and half-diminished. Memorizing these patterns will make it a lot easier to improvise simple walking bass lines over jazz standards.

Now we are ready to take these same steps and apply them to any jazz tune , be it a blues tune or standard 32 bar tune such as Autumn Leaves.

Being able to create walking basslines and fill them in with chords on the spot is a great skill to have and will definitely make you as a guitarist more desirable in a solo or duo situation. I greatly value your systematic and to the point approach. And it is a topic which up to here I have never found treated in a stand-alone lesson. Thank you a lot for this and for all the other online lessons you publish and help making progress as a jazz guitarist.