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Walking Bass Lines For Guitar
6–8 minutes
In this lesson, you will learn how to combine chords with a
walking bass line, a concept that is becoming more and more in
demand these days. As club and restaurant owners are cutting
budgets, one way to keep our gig as a guitar player is to slim
down the ensemble to a duo or solo.
A walking bass line walks through the chord progression, one
note per beat. Its function is to outline the chords of the
progression and provide a smooth transition from one chord to
another.
While walking bass in a band is generally played by the bass
guitar or double bass player, being able to play walking bass
lines is an essential skill for jazz guitarists when playing without
a bass player.
The difficulty in walking bass on the guitar lies in the
combination of playing chords and bass at the same time.
Walking bass on guitar is usually played fingerstyle. Use your
thumb for the bass notes and your other fingers to comp the
chords.
In this lesson, you will learn how to write and play a walking
bass line over a 12-bar blues in F.
Being able to walk a bass line and comp the chords at the same
time is an invaluable skill to have and one that will allow you to
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work in situations where other guitarists cannot.
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Table of Contents
1. Video, Backing Tracks, and Tabs/Notation
2. Step 1 – Playing The Roots
3. Step 2 – Half Time
4. Step 3 – Walking Bass
5. Step 4 – The Chords
6. Step 5 – Combining Walking and Comping
7. Step 6 – Adding Chord Substitutions
8. Walking Bass Line Patterns
Video – Jazz Blues Walking Bass
Walking Bass Guitar + Chords - F Blues (Jazz Guitar Lesson)
Drum Backing Track
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Listen & Play-Along
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Step 1: Playing the Roots
The very start in learning how to walk a bass line is being able
to play the root note of each chord on the lowest two strings (A
and E strings) of the guitar.
The root note will usually be the first note of every bar
throughout the entire chord sequence.
In this example, the roots of each chord are written out on the
lowest two strings.
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Step 2: Half Time
In the next step of constructing walking bass lines, we will play
what bass players refer to as half time, where the half note is
the rhythmic focus of the line.
This is done by adding a note on the third beat of each bar for a
duration of two beats.
This note can either be:
A chord tone: the 3rd, 5th, or 7th of the chord you are on. The
chord tones are the most important notes to use in your bass
line.
An approach note (AN): this is a note that leads us into the next
chord by either a half-step (one fret) above or below the
following root. For example, if we are going to an F7 chord, the
two chromatic approach notes of the target note (F) would be E
(below) or Gb (above). This chromatic approach allows us to
add a sense of voice leading to our bassline and immediately
brings it into the jazz idiom, as chromatic tones are very
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common in jazz.
A diatonic note (DN): this is a note that comes from the scale of
the chord you are on, but is not a chord note.
Notice that we now have a rhythmic change in the last two bars.
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.
Step 3: Walking the Bass
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Now that we have introduced a quarter note pulse in the last two
measures of example 2 we can now “walk” a bass line through
the entire blues progression.
When adding the extra notes there are two things to keep in
mind:
1. The last note before a new chord is often an approach note,
now written as a quarter note.
2. We can use any note from the diatonic scale or arpeggio to fill in
the remaining quarter notes.
Step 4: The Chords
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Now that you know how to build a walking bass line, we are
ready to add some chord voicings.
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:
Step 5: Combining Walking and Comping
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Now that we have the bass line and the chords under our
fingers it is time to bring them both together.
The chord voicings will often appear on the “and” of the first beat
(bar 1 and 2), but also on the first beat (bar 3), or the “and” of
the third beat (bar 4).
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.
Step 6: Adding Chord Substitutions
The final step is to add some chord substitutions to the
progression.
Chord Substitution 1
The first substitution occurs in bar 5 of the main example.
Instead of playing two bars of Bb7 or one bar of Bb7 and one
bar of B°7, I play a descending chord progression: Bb7 to Ab7 to
G7 to C7.
Ab7 is the tritone substitution of D7, the V of G7.
G7 – C7 is the II V back to F7. Normally this would be Gm7 –
C7, but in a blues, you can make every chord into a dominant-
type chord.
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Chord Substitution 2
The next substitution happens in bar 10, where I delay the C7
with a C9sus4 chord.
Adding a sus chord before a dominant chord is an effective way
to create more movement in your chord voicings.
Chord Substitution 3
In bar 15, I play a Gb7 after the F7.
Gb7 is the tritone substitute of C7 and is another way to create
movement in the chord progression.
Chord Substitution 4
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.
Ab7 is the tritone substitute of D7.
Gm7 becomes G7, as you can turn any chord in a blues into a
dominant chord.
Gb7 is the tritone substitute of C7.
Walking Bass Line Patterns
Here is a series of walking bass line patterns ordered by chord
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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.
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Now we are ready to take these same steps and apply them to
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any jazz tune, be it a blues tune or standard 32 bar tune such as
Autumn Leaves. You might want to try writing out the steps
when first applying them to other tunes, and once you are
proficient at writing them out try and walk/comp on the fly.
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.
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