As long we are practicing baselines in the original key, there is a lot of stuff to work with: Backing tracks, loops, getting the original song and maybe remove the baseline with ai. But what if I need to do that in a totally different key?
Sure, the first thing is to transpose all the cords, fills, riffs and transitions into the new key, but what’s next? How to effectively get this into practice?
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A Songsterr account, practice 10x more than your on the forum, get ass whoopin’ good and party on Garth!
An artists nature may be hindered by an academic approach.
This is the way.
Nice bass in your pic…
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A shift on a song with no open string notes can be pretty simple, just shift up or down a keep your shape. A key shift from female singer to male singer can be wild and that depends of what key it lands, it could be simple but it could be “not fun”
For example, this is one of the song in a set list that we play regularly it shifts one whole step, from A to B which raise it to the whole new level when shift at the solo and all the way to outtro. Ridiculously fun to play as a bonus Chris plays inverted and upside down bass and offers up some unique fills from that style of playing too. Check it out.
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This was the constant mantra of the jazz faculty in college.
“You don’t know a song until you’ve transposed it into all 12 keys!!”
The best way to get key movements worked on is with the ear.
So step 1 - learn the song real well in the key it’s in.
Then, when you can hear the song in your brain, when you can anticipate all the moves and changes and you know exactly what it’s supposed to sound like, when you move it to another key, the relative pitch of everything should move with you.
This is a long-term, big picture kinda answer, and it may not be helpful at all.
I also am not totally sure what would be more helpful, or what it is you’re looking for.
Changing keys is something all us bassists have to do while the guitarists whip out their capos, and the singers just sit there and tell us “higher, no lower, no, lower still…” so it does come up quite a bit.
Lemme know if there’s anything I can add that would be more helpful and specific to what you’re looking for.
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Thanks, that helps.
Ok, let’s make an example:
I’m about to learn Jolene by BossHoss
The song is quite easy and the baseline too, but I need to play it in Gm instead of Cm. This reveals 2 major problems of changing the key:
1: Changing the Chords is quite easy, everything can simply be moved down a string. But then on my 4-String bass I miss the lower 5th. How to create this rocking country vibe without that?
1b: A few times during the song, the root of the transposed baseline moves to the lower Dm. I have tried to play that an octave higher, but that doesn’t seem to fit that well in the movement of the song. Is there a good alternative?
2: There is no audio source to play along. There are some sources to change a pitch, but the distance is that far, that it is outside of my technical possibilities. So, how to get a good practice in the new key then?
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Have you considered a drop-D tuning to go low? Easy to do between songs, if you ignore the extra flop from the artist formerly known as the E-string. 
On the other hand, I see a lot of people put a Capo (third fret) on the guitars in the song. Now, I don’t know if that’s the case, but are you 100% sure you, as the bass player, need to transpose down a fifth?
I’m asking because my band did this to me… 
They simply didn’t put the capo on and told me “Oh no, it’s not in C, it’s in G.” Which sounds exactly like your example.
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Yeah, maybe thats the case, I’ll find out if I’m playing with them. Then its 3 bars higher and easy.
Thanks
Ha!
This is my world exactly. I played in folk/bluegrass/americana/country groups a ton over the last decade. The importance of a 5th above the root vs a 5th below the root is something that only bassists care about.
But we care, dammit!!
You’re doing everything right. You have to decide to either:
a.) take the root up an octave and play the 5th below the root (not usually a great move, as the root is always going to be more important sonically)
b.) play the 5th above the root. (This is usually the move, and it can be really annoying to us, but - I assure you - no one else on earth will care.)
Again, having developed your bassist ears and sensibilities, it may sound very wrong and bad to you to go up for those transposed Ds, but no one else will notice or care. This is our world. Play them where you can on the 4 string, and you’ll have to adjust your ear to the transposition.
I don’t know the app or AI that does this well. I know you can pitch-shift inside of Logic (can Garage Band do it too?), but it sounds pretty weird and digital.
My move, usually, is to listen to the song enough to know the form, and then to just play through with a drum loop, and try and sing the vocal parts so I don’t get lost.
Another, riskier, option is to play the original audio, and turn the volume off on your bass. Then you play along in the new key (that you can’t hear) and make sure you’re lining up your changes to the song.
This has a big downside where it doesn’t make sense to your ears-to-hand connection. But it’s the survial-guide solution for when you have to practice a transposition without a transposed recording.
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