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Charles Berthoud
Charles Berthoud

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#129 - 7 Cool Licks You Can Use In Any Bassline

My fellow bassists,

The winner of this month's poll was "cool licks you can throw in any bass line", so here it is!

These licks start pretty simple but get quite complex and dissonant by the end. I wanted to give you a range of flavours to work with - the earlier ones you can use pretty often whereas the ones at the end are more unorthodox and you might want to use more sparingly unless you have a very open-minded band!

Remember, these licks are all in C Major meaning you'll have to transpose them unless you're playing a song in C Major. For example, if you're playing a song in F major you'll need to move these licks up 5 frets or down 7 frets, which is the interval between C and F.

Let me know if you have any requests or suggestions about how I can help you learn and implement new licks in your bass lines. I haven't taught this type of thing as much on Patreon and so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the best way to help you!

Thanks for coming here and learning with me, have a great weekend and I'll see you in the next lesson!

Charles

Comments

Happy to help!

Charles Berthoud

This is great! I feel like I have the same fills Iโ€™m always rotating in between. This will add quite a few more to the mix. Thank you!

Matt Bourisaw

Haha yeah the third is higher than the root so I said we're going up to the third! It's also the most distinctive note of the lick which is why I focused on it

Charles Berthoud

For anyone that hasn't delved into the world of Music Theory. That B Diminished Chord substitution sounds scary, but really isn't difficult at all to understand. We're in the Key of C and G7 is the fifth chord of C. Normally, we'd use the 5 Chord to bring us back to the 1. The 5 chord has what we call "Dominant Function", which is just a fancy way of saying that it makes your ears expect the music to go back to the 1 Chord, the Root. In a Major Scale, the 7 chord is a Diminished Chord and also has Dominant function. There's reasons that I won't go into here as to why this is the case, but its all SUPER fascinating if you're a Music Theory nerd like me! Charles being a concert pianist, I'm sure also deeply loves Music Theory and all it's intricacies. For anyone interested, Signals Music Studio/Jake Lizzio is my favorite Youtube channel(s) for learning theory. He's a guitar player, but exceptionally good at explaining these topics in ways you'll understand.

Ralyks

Lick 6 is a blast to play slapped

Ralyks

Makes more sense to me in Lick 2 to say that we go up to the 5th, rather than down compared to the 1st lick since we're still dropping down to the third from that 5th, but I guess the way I should be thinking of this is in terms of Target Notes, yes? Since, yes, the Major 3rd we're playing is in fact an octave higher than the previous. The autism is kicking in again

Ralyks


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