Duck Dunn’s playing is a great study for those who want to learn solid blues and r&b/soul style bass. There’s a reason he played on so many recordings. Tommy Shannon is another guy whose a great study for variations on typical 12 bar blues.
Blues is simple stuff but the challenge has always been to play it well requires far more knowledge of timing and scales than most people would think. There are so many different styles of blues and each one has it’s own twists and bends.
Texas style blues playing differs from Chicago style blues that differs from Delta blues or jazzier style blues from St. Louis or New York. Memphis and Muscle Shoals soul isn’t the same as Motown or Philly soul. There’s lots of different adaptations.
The fun thing about playing it is working to learn the various differences between all of them. The notes are the same but the “feel” can be very different and so are the bass lines we play or improvise over each. It’s a study in an of itself.
As Stevie Ray and Double Trouble was a local Austin band long before becoming famous worldwide, I got to see them play live, up close and personal, dozens of times. Every show was a master class in Texas Blues. Besides marveling at Stevie’s guitar slinging, I was fascinated with Tommy’s rock-solid bass grooves. He was always the calm anchor on the stage, and his line variations were creative and always spot on.
He still plays at Antone’s when he’s in town. I need to go catch him again soon.
Yup, you hit the nail on the head here. Tommy’s playing is a master class in how to hold a groove. He’s not fast or fancy he is precisely as you describe, rock solid. If you’re playing in a blues trio with a really great rhythm and riff player like Stevie that’s your role. Just hold down the bottom end and keep that groove intact.
One thing I’ve found over time is that being the bassist in a trio of any kind is far more challenging than playing in a larger group. There are times when there are holes to fill and you need to see if there’s a way you can fill them without losing that groove. That’s where knowledge of the fretboard and extended scales really helps.
I’ve been a blues devotee all my life, and I’ve also played bass in a blues trio.
We covered tunes by the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top and really early Beatles rock ‘n’ roll, which, of course, were largely based on I-IV-V progressions, regardless of tempo. Each tune we played was differentiated by tempo, attitude and, most importantly, FEEL.
So much can be said with so little — as long as the feel is honored honestly.
@Laurent, you were attracted to the pure groove in the Etta tune you cited. You felt it. Now, pursue it. Learn it. Play it. You got this and so much more. It starts with wanting to.
Here again we see newbie players far more concerned with playing the exact notes in a bass line than accurately capturing the “feel”. In all honesty with few exceptions the notes don’t matter all that much.
They don’t matter to the band or the crowd as long as the notes fit the chord structure of the song. Just make sure to hit the “money notes” and avoid the “clams” that don’t fit and you’re fine. But mess up the “feel” and it’s very noticeable.
I recall playing a Sunday night blues jam I played nearly every week. A drummer who wanted to sit in couldn’t play a shuffle beat. Blues is mostly shuffles so how in did this guy think he could sit in at a blues jam and not know how to play one?
The same thing is true of a bassist. Shuffles are a back bone of blues just as those plain vanilla I > V feels are a back bone of a whole lot of country tunes. Those are things every bassist needs to have in his bag to play music even at home.
Funk has it’s “feel” as well. As Bootsy always said don’t mess up the ONE count. You can do whatever you like with the rest but when it’s time to get back on the ONE get back on the One. It’s the basis of the funk groove.
The bass has to “propel” the tune and it’s the feel of the groove and playing it accurately that does that. I could play a 1 > 4 > 5 pattern with no more than a pedal on the root note of each chord change and as long as I play the correct feel it works.
Damn straight. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to watch masters hold down the groove with grace and chops born of love for the blues. Truly inspirational for the faithful and those who feel.
Over the years as I’ve given lessons to new players I’m sometimes frustrated by those who want to skip over those basics and just want me to teach them how to play a specific bass line of a certain tune.
We all had to crawl, then learn to stand before we could walk and walk before we could run. Why should learning to play an instrument be any different? There’s a reason why we need to learn those fundamentals because over time we need them.
And here again we see a web user who draws conclusions out of 1 single request, having no idea how the person who is asking practices his / her instrument days in days out … with which intentions, with what type of advice, with what background … with all due respect and no offense intended
If you can play a one octave scale with 1-finger-per-fret fingering, you’ll have this.
The main line starts on:
5th fret A.
Then 4th fret D, then 7th fret D.
Then that cool little walk up is all on D:
4,5,7
That happens a few times.
If you hear it change and move to a lower thing - its this low walk back up to the D chord:
5E, 7E, 4A back to the 5th fret of the A.
But if you get that phrase at the very beginning and move it to the 3rd fret of the E string (when the chord moves down to G) and the 5th fret of the E string (when the song moves to A) that bass line is the main pattern, and there are a few moves in between (like that low walk up I sketched above).
No video or official tabs on this schedule here, but that is a spectacular groove.
Hope this helps.
Laurent, this post was made long after I provided you with some help regarding the Etta James tune and it was in response to posts others made not your OP. It’s generic advice I would give and have given to a whole lot of players who are just learning the instrument as it was intended to be here.
Take from it whatever you wish. Or take nothing at all. I’m often posting just to share my own experiences from when I started playing over 50 years ago when there were no forums like this full of help and lessons or instructional YouTube videos. We had to learn a very different way. From each other.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved your advices. What really made me react is mostly the first paragraphe you wrote. Sorry for being a slight too touchy on this one !
To share neutrally about learning bass : I think knowing the theory is a must, to get there I sometimes need to play the think just to play it, and analyse it afterwards. That said … since in the end I don’t have the tab here, I will have to reconstruct it myself with all the advice I was given here, and that will be part of the process of learning the theory … I hope !
My first paragraph wasn’t directed at you personally. I just see so many posts and threads here where someone is trying to figure out a bass line and yet if they had just a little more understanding of theory or more ear training the answers they’re looking for would be more easily come by. So my paragraph was about that and I apologize for how I stated it if you believed it was only about you. It was not.
I look at learning to play bass or virtually any musical instrument as being much like learning a new language. Music has a language of it’s own as well. As we learn a new language we learn some of the “rules” associated with that language. I see the same necessity in learning to play any musical instrument. This is all theory is about. It’s just learning some of the rules and I would agree with anyone who says but that’s boring as all hell. It is but in the long run it does help one to progress faster on their own. It adds logic to why we play what we play how to play it and when.
Most of us plan to play rock based music and most of it is based on the same principals blues is based on. Rock was birthed from the blues and for that matter country has similar roots but it’s based more on bluegrass. So learning the “language” of the blues helps us learn most rock as well and over time we learn some of the short cuts or colloquial expressions used. That’s all the numbering system is. It’s just a simpler way to communicate with one another through patterns is all.
In the end all of this should also make it easier to construct the tab you or anyone else would want to create. That’s just one form of writing out the musical language as opposed to speaking it. Sorry for writing another essay here. I just wanted to be clear that I was not directing myself to you alone but rather stating my own opinions about learning to play however right or wrong they may be seen by some.
