>Step by step

Choosing the right notes for your bassline

1 First, I want to introduce you to the bass clef. It exists so that bass parts on the stave are easier to read, with fewer ledger lines. The blob in the centre rests on a line that represents the F below middle C, so from this we can tell that the notes on the five lines, from the bottom up, will be G,B, D, F and A. The notes in the spaces, meanwhile, will be A,C, E and G. 2 Now that’s out of the way, we can get down to chiselling out some funky grooves. We’re going to start with a basic, rock-influenced idea using bass guitar samples. The key component to an effective bassline is figuring out how it works with the rhythm of the drums. Here’s a short four-bar groove for us to work with. 3 The most basic bassline technique is simply to pin down the root notes of the chord every time the chord changes. We’ve got a simple electric piano part playing a progression with a new chord every bar – Em - G - D - A. So to start with, our bassline could just follow this, holding down the notes E,G, D, and A on the downbeat of each bar. 4 Next, let’s explore some more interesting options. Try laying down some straight eighths with our sampled bass guitar sound. This approach might work well for a driving rock tune, for instance – simple eighth-notes holding down the root notes of the chord. 5 Let’s now break the rhythm up a little by focusing on one particular element of the drum track: the kick drum. This time, we’re still playing the root note of each chord, but we’re only playing in sync with the kick drum beats. If your kick drum and bass are perfectly in sync, it provides a solid and foolproof foundation to build the rest of your tune on. 6 Now we can start to fill in some of the gaps, using some extra notes that coincide with other rhythmic elements from the drums, chiefly the snares. This example dials us back a little further towards our original eighth-notes idea, but with a bit more rhythmic variation, matching the overall beat of the drum track more closely.

7 We can make a more melodic line by shifting some of the repeated notes to adjacent scale tones. The tonal centre of the piece is E minor, so most of our extra notes will be from the E minor pentatonic scale –E G A B D. In bar 1, all I’ve done is change the snare drum accent to a minor third, G. I’ve also shortened the third note to allow a space for the hi-hat. 8 The chord in bar 2 is G major (G-B-D), so this time, I’ve used a fifth away from the root note of the chord to coincide with the snare beat, D. For the last note that leads into the next bar of D, I’ve used a B, which sets up the movement from D down to B and up again that alternates in bar 3. Bar 4 dips down to the flat seventh of the A major chord (G). 9 Next up, here’s a subby, sine wave synth bass sound supporting some big synth chords in a section that could be a bridge or middle 8 of a pop track: Em - D - G - Am - G - C. In this example, we’re holding down the roots of the chords once again, which would contrast well with a more rhythmic part in a verse or chorus section. 10 This time, the keyboards are playing the same chords in the same inversions, but we’ve shifted some of the bass notes to other ‘chord tones’ (notes that occur in the accompanying chords). This is a good trick for building tension, whatever rhythm you’re playing – whether it’s sustained notes like this, or a more rhythmic groove. 11 In this next example, I’ve gone all retro with a Stevie Wonder-inspired Em - A7 pop-funk track. This line accentuates the downbeat of each chord change every two bars with a heavy root note, then riffs on the E minor scale over the next two bars. The first long E note has been pitchbent down an octave, and there’s another flashy E minor run to round things off. 12 In another version of the same track, the bass synth doesn’t shift to play the A note when the A7 chord arrives on the downbeat of bar 3 – it carries on rooted on E. When you continue a bass note beneath changing chords like this, it changes the effective tonal centre of the chord, making things a lot more tense. I’ve used a passing

D#, note, to link the two sections.