Steve Lawson
Chromatic lines in a beginners’ lesson? Just relax and go with Steve Lawson’s impeccably even flow
Looking to master the bass-ics? (we’re 99% sure no-one has ever made that pun) Steve Lawson can show you the way.
Hello again! This month we’re going to step away from patterns formed from scale and chords, and look at some ways we can use chromatic lines to join up the roots of chords. The word ‘chromatic’ just means using notes drawn from all 12 notes between a root note and an octave – in other words, on every fret of a bass – rather than sticking to keys and scales, which are defined as subsets of those 12 notes. Most of the patterns we’ve looked at so far have been drawn from either the major scale (seven notes out of the 12 available) pentatonic patterns (five notes) or triad chord shapes (three notes).
Here, we’re going to be looking at approaching the root of a chord with a succession of notes a semitone apart. These can be applied to either major or minor chords, and bring a distinct flavour to a lines. Let’s jump straight in, with a line that connects up the roots in an alternating two-chord sequence
Example 1
There’s nothing explicit in this line to tell us whether it’s Major or minor. In fact, the two notes at the end of the second bar walking up to the D are the Major and minor 3rd of the A chord. Here we get to think about the concept of weak and strong beats; if you put a note onto a strong beat, your audience are more likely to hear its intention harmonically, rather than just a melodic journey from one chord-defining note to the next. One and three are the strongest beats, then two and four, and then the off-beats between them. So with those last two notes, we’ve placed the C on a stronger beat than the C#. That doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t play it against a Major chord, but it does mean that we’re setting up a little tension with that particular chromatic note.
This is one of the single most enjoyable things about building lines from chromatic sequences rather than sticking to chord notes; we get to inject a range of degrees of tension into a line, and as we experiment we can decide how much of that tension we want to include in the song we’re working on.
“SOMETIMES IT’S THE STRANGER, LESS COMMON ELEMENTS IN A LINE THAT MAKE IT RECOGNISABLE”
One of my favourite bassists for this kind of playing is Kim Deal, formerly of the Pixies. Have a listen to the track ‘Hey’ from their masterpiece album Doolittle; the entire bass part in the verses is a series of chromatic lines that join up the roots of the chords. The chords themselves are a fairly predictable sequence, but Kim’s bass-line brings a whole load of tension and suspense to the line by not thinking about the notes in the key when building her bass-line, but instead just using all the chromatic notes between any pair of chords, and messing with the timing so they land where she wants them.
So we can try out the first bass-line from Example 1 over both A minor to D minor and A Major to D Major, or even A minor to D Major. Each time we change the quality of one or either chords, the degree of tension in the line changes.
Let’s try approaching from the other side of the root note – a descending chromatic run:
Example 2
This sounds a little more unusual, right? It’s nowhere near as common a pattern as the first one. Here we can consider the line between bass parts that sound like compositions, and parts that are more generic material, perhaps associated with a style, but less likely to come off like we’re playing a cover of someone else’s song. Sometimes it’s the stranger, less common elements in a line that make it recognisable. These can be purely rhythmic; the bass-line of ‘Stir It Up’ by Bob Marley is just a triad, but its rhythm makes it instantly recognisable. Or take ‘Chameleon’ by Herbie Hancock, which has one of the most famous chromatic walk-up lines ever; it’s the rhythm of the other two notes over each chord that makes the otherwise quite generic chromatic walk recognisable as that particular funk fusion masterpiece.
Reversing the line, and walking down to the root, gives us some scope for playing in a way
“UNDERSTANDING HOW A LINE LIKE THIS IS CONSTRUCTED IS ONE THING, BUT BEING ABLE TO PLAY IT IS QUITE ANOTHER”
that is less common – and therefore perhaps more fertile ground for writing a line that will stand out as a unique composition in its own right. A big part of the journey towards becoming an effective bass player in a band is acquiring the ability to choose when to make your bass-lines stand out, and the wisdom to judge when it would be better for them to slot into the arrangement and be more felt than heard.
The bassist’s role is often paradoxical; we can have a greater impact by being less noticeable. As we build a vocabulary using chromatic notes, it’s always worth applying some kind of transformation; try approaching from the other side of the note, or as we’re about to try, approaching a different note in the chord, to help give the line a more unusual character.
Let’s try the same kind of line but this time we’ll approach the fifth. Again, there’ll be no information in the bass part that definitely ties it to being major or minor, so we can try it with both sets of chords:
Example 3
Here, using the sharp 4 leading up to the fifth gives a sound that reminds me of 60s TV themes - sort of Munsters-ish. Noticing this sort of thing is an important part of building a vocabulary for composing and improvising; associating fragments of technical knowledge about ways of making music with the musical styles and emotions that they correspond to in your head. If you build up a mental library of these associations, then the next time you’re thinking ‘I really want to write a song about [insert subject]’ or coming up with a line for a song that’s already written, you can give yourself some creative parameters to narrow down the task for finding a line that fits. We all do this as a matter of course when we play lines that are ‘funky’ or ‘soulful’, but there are loads of little harmonic tricks and specific note combinations that can give us a great starting point for spicing up a bass part!
Let’s try a four-note chromatic approach. Here, we’re definitely in similar territory to the tune we mentioned earlier, ‘Chameleon’, but we’re going to take the generic part and see what we can do with it. Here’s one possibility:
Example 4
Here we actually have a mix of four-note and three-note chromatic groupings, just so we can get the line to move smoothly from A to D and back again. The overall effect is of a really cool walking line, which depending on the context could be quite jazzy or soulful – or if you played it with a shuffle, it’d be a pretty quirky blues line! Whatever feel we put on it, we’re beginning to hear how chromatic lines can bring all kinds of interesting movement to very simple chord changes, and can hint at different stylistic possibilities that may well influence what the rest of the band are doing as well.
Understanding how a line like this is constructed is one thing, but being able to play it is quite another. There are a number of different ways to approach the fretting hand around lines like this, so let’s have a look at some of them.
One of the most commonly taught ways to play chromatic lines is to play each note with a separate finger. Known as playing ‘one finger per fret’ it’s a method that’s taught for its accuracy and the option to control each note, as well as the increased possibilities for speed over a line that requires you to shift your hand about a lot. The problem is that in the lower positions, below the fifth fret, it can involve keeping your hand under quite a lot of tension, and can sometimes lead to wrist pain and various aches in your fingers. Allowing your hands to go from a relaxed
state to a tense state as you press notes down is really important for maintaining blood flow to your muscles – but if your muscles are constantly tense, it restricts blood flow, and that’s not good for getting a healthy supply of oxygen to those muscles.
So while one-finger-per-fret does have some advantages for tricky articulation, I’d suggest approaching with caution and abide by the simple rule of ‘if it hurts, stop and find someone who can advise on why it hurts and how to stop that from happening’. The kind of ache, or sore fingers, you get after playing bass for longer periods is quite distinct from that burning sensation you get when your technique isn’t right and your hand is under too much tension. If you ever feel that, get some help via a reputable bass teacher.
For a more relaxed hand position, we can use four fingers over three frets and allow our third finger (ring finger) to support our little finger rather than having a fret of its own. Let’s try the following line with a variety of fingering techniques:
Example 5
The tab here invites you to use open strings for the A and D, but we can even play a line like this with our index finger playing all four chromatic notes in a row. This only works at slow speed, and it has an impact on how the line is articulated, but there are a lot of situations where that kind of relaxed hand shifting is preferable to an obsessive adherence to a fixed orthodoxy regarding hand positioning.
All of those things need to be weighed up in relation to the context, the impact that our technique has on the way the music sounds, and the amount of energy we expend playing it. Inefficiency is generally bad, but moving your hand up and down the neck isn’t necessarily inefficient! So, try Example 5 in a number of ways, beginning with one-fingerper-fret, and see how each of them feels. You don’t have to stretch your hand so your four fingers cover all the frets at once; that would be painful. Instead, keep your thumb anchored in the same place on the back of the neck, and allow your hand to pivot slightly to facilitate reaching all the notes. If you move this shape up the neck to play in another key, you’ll find that the one-finger-per-fret approach makes way more sense when the distance between four adjacent frets gets closer to the relaxed span of your hand.
As always, experimentation is key, and just to reiterate, if it hurts – stop! Barring that, have fun seeing what kind of interesting lines you can find hidden away in these chromatic approach notes, and be sure to report back next month for more low-end adventures…