Day 3 - Essential Bass Lines

Being a working musician these days is largely about being a chameleon. You must be able to fit in any ensemble and be able to know enough about the style of music and genre to play with the correct sensibilities. In this lesson we explore 10 bass lines that I believe are essential for any tuba player or bassist to know. I have played all of these many times on the bandstand over the years and they are all kind of in that area of things people expect you to know.

Practice Time!

Below you will find a list of the bass lines discussed in the video and the corresponding sheet music. Many of these lines are loops and consist of only a few bars, some of them are not. I encourage you to learn the entire song and play along with the recording. As you do this, it is important to record yourself and listen back to how you sounded. The goal is to line right up with these bass players so it almost seems as you were in these original recordings. From a reading and technique standpoint, these small excerpts are not very difficult. That being said, the focus should be largely based around “feel.” That is a long term concept to work on and these groove will get you off to a great start.

As you practice these songs, don’t just play the one tune from each artist and be done. Explore the entire album. The more you know about the album, artist and time period will help you understand how it needs to feel. Another great way to dive in to the style of these songs is by creating an automated radio station on a service like Pandora, Spotify or AppleMusic. These services will pair up similar music to listen to and you can really jump down the rabbit hole and sit and groove for hours.

The Chicken

Written by Pee Wee Ellis for James Brown’s album “Popcorn” in 1969 and arguably dade popular by the late great Jaco Pastorius.