Beginners’ Tutorial
Take a trip with veteran sonic scout Steve Lawson, and discover a new world of improvisational vocabulary
Create your bass identity with the cosmic Steve Lawson
This month we’re going to continue our choose-your-own-adventure look at improvisation by revisiting an idea that we looked at a while back about pentatonic scales. One of the things we noted was that major and minor pentatonic shapes come in pairs: there’s a major for every minor that shares the same set of notes, and vice versa. It’s the same idea as the concept of modes, for those of you that have looked into that, but at a much simpler level.
Let’s recap how that relationship works. C major is often our start point for explaining things because it is the key that has no sharps or flats, so we have fewer elements to keep track of while naming the notes we’re using. Let’s look at a C Major pentatonic. We can see that the notes are C D E G A C – that is, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th notes of a C Major scale.
The relative minor key of C Major is A minor. We can find the relative minor by either going down a minor third (three frets) from the root of any major key, or by building a scale from the 6th degree of the major scale, using the same set of notes. Either way, that leads us to an A if we’re in C Major, so we say that A minor is the relative minor of C Major – the minor key that shares the same notes. If we play a minor pentatonic shape starting on A, we get A C D E G A – exactly the same notes, in the same order as the C Major pentatonic, but we’ve rotated the circle. Let’s visualise them in a circle: If we start the circle on C, we get a C Major pentatonic. If we start on A we get an A minor pentatonic. So what does this knowledge do for us in relation to improvising? It means that we have a simpler set of patterns to remember, which can work over multiple chords. This realisation – that we don’t have to have a completely new reference point and set of notes to think about for every chord change – is the start point of a lifelong journey for any musician.
A huge amount of the quest for fluidity, melodic invention, bass-lines that connect chords in interesting ways, and fills that glide effortlessly over the chords, is about understanding and implementing what we learn about shared note-sets across different chords. And there’s no more consistent and common usage than this pair of Major and minor chords.
Let’s have a look at some examples, the first of which is a simple bass-line moving from C to Am:
Example 1
Our baseline (no pun intended) is this simple pattern, which uses just the root and fifth of each chord. Whenever we're playing a pattern that repeats over two bars like this, there’s the option to occasionally replace the second bar with a fill. This concept can prove to be particularly useful when we want to break up a piece of music into a number of component parts – adding a fill every 8 or 16 bars, or as the song leads into the next section.
Example 2 is one possible fill, and lets us see what happens when we use the same fill over the C Major and A minor chords.
Example 2
Notice how the fill is identical in each case. We play the root on the first beat of the bar, then play a fill that works over both chords. For each chord, the notes represent a pattern taken from the pentatonic built on the root – C Major pentatonic and then A minor pentatonic. Its character will change depending on the chord it's played against, and by using that same fill we create continuity between the parts; it’s slick and it’s memorable for the audience. Let’s try another one:
Example 3
Do you recognise the fill in Bar 2? It’s borrowed from the bass-line to ‘My Girl’ – again, still just a pentatonic run, but by changing the rhythm a little, we get to link our playing to something that the audience will recognise and smile at.
This back and forth between new and old, familiar and novel is at the heart of what improvising in pop music is all about. We’re not – for the most part – trying to play things that sound like they’ve landed here from another galaxy. We’re just using our knowledge of music, and specifically our compendium of possible phrases, licks, rhythmic ideas, our knowledge of scales and command of melodic patterns to choose something that works in the moment. We could just write a line and
play it the same every time, but there are many situations in which changing things up a little can keep them moving forward, which can be hugely advantageous for musicians and audience alike. That's why our objective here is to start building a phrase-book that incorporates references to classic bass playing and also little ideas of our own – things we’ve picked up from books and videos that started life as exercises, but which can (with a little bit of imagination) be transformed into musical gems that we keep in our toolkit to deploy at the right moment.
For bar 4 of Example 3, I’ve done just that: adapted the ‘My Girl’ line to fit the A minor chord and to give it some ‘shape’. The resulting lick really reminds me of ‘Moods For Moderns’ by Elvis Costello, but these pentatonic shapes crop up in so many places, as bass-lines and melodies.
Here we hit one of the ways that our learning traces a meandering, mutually reinforcing path between improvisation training, song learning and the work we’re doing on scales, arpeggios and the kinds of patterns that make up the building blocks of Western music. We find that by keeping part of our attention on the process of building vocabulary for improv, we listen more intently when learning patterns or songs because they are likely to yield phrases and lines and ideas that we can cannibalise for our own library of material that we draw on.
I have favourite licks, lines, solos and patterns from many sources: my vocabulary is culled from favourite songs, from other people’s solos, from technical exercises and from just mucking about on the bass, exploring geometric shapes on the fingerboard over some kind of backing.
It’s that ‘some kind of backing’ that becomes important to us here, because learning what does and doesn’t work isn’t just a matter of reading someone else’s list of things that do and don’t work. Remember, here we get to choose our own adventure. We need to be making decisions based on our own taste, not a list of rules laid down by someone else. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t loads of great teaching resources that we can draw on, but we can hold pretty lightly to someone else’s proclamations of what is good or bad.
What we need to do is practise these patterns in context. That context can be as elaborate as a full band, or as easy to access as a YouTube video. We can program drums and keyboards, use the loops that came with our computer or DAW, we can use backing tracks sourced from online teachers, or we can just jam with another bassist, swapping roles and trying out fills over grooves or chords devised on the fly for just that purpose.
If you’ve followed my previous columns, you’ll be well aware that I’m convinced that a looper is the greatest practice tool there is – not to mention the greatest solo performance tool as well, but we’ll leave that for a different column! A loop pedal allows us to do two things. The first is we get to practice to a backing track or riff or chord progression that is designed to fit our needs perfectly. If we want to play over one chord for 20 minutes, we can do that; if we want to add just one more chord into the equation, we can do that too. If we want to loop the same part a little faster, all we have to do is replay it and loop that instead… the possibilities are endless, and easily to hand (or foot, in this case).
Which brings us to our second great learning experience with a looper: we get to double our learning with any exercise, because we have to learn how to make the accompanying loop too! So if we’re trying to practise our major pentatonic shapes over C Major to A minor, we need to be able to play a part that outlines those two chords. We don’t have to learn super-complicated tapping parts, or buy a six-string bass and start playing altered harmonies, but we do get to explore what happens if we add a fifth to our C and a fifth to our A, and play them one octave up.
Let’s do that, shall we? The fifth, as we’ve explored a number of times before, is the easiest note to add to a chord because the interval and its shape on the bass neck remain the same, whether the chord is major or minor. So C Major to A minor looks like this:
Example 4
Wait, we’ve got double stops and we’re playing right up the dusty end, in a beginners’ column? Yup – as we’ve said before, it’s only convention that guides us away from these things, and after all, novice guitarists play full six-string chords in their first lesson. Adding double stops to our repertoire doesn’t require an advanced level of dexterity, and it helps us hear what’s going on in the music so much better, as well as offering a whole other set of creative options when arranging material in our band situations.
So – we can loop that little sequence and then practise variations on all the patterns we’ve tried today against it. You’ll see that I’ve intentionally given this one a different rhythmic signature to the rest of the lines – that’s to prod you gently into improvising. You’re going to have to adapt either the chordal part or the bass part to make the rhythms sit well together. In doing that, you’ll discover a world of subtle variation that will open up your perspective whenever you pick up your bass to play in any situation.
You’re in the driving seat, and you get to decide what the right thing to do is. All that’s left to do is to spend the rest of your life feeding your ears with amazing ideas, and work those out on your instrument. Sounds like a life well lived, eh? Have fun – and I’ll see you back here in a month...