James Jamerson used THIS exercise as a cheat code to create hit after hit bass line - lemme show you how to use it to write your own bangin’ bass lines in ANY style of music.
If you’re doing the Beginner to Badass course, this lesson would fit nicely in the Module 12 ballpark when you start learning about building killer bass lines. The 16th note stuff will be beyond our scope in the course though.
Jamerson's Chromatic Exercise Full PDF
I love the Standing in the Shadows book, but it bugged me that the exercise was only written in a few keys... so I've detailed it out for you in every key as I think Jamerson might have played.
How cool is it we have a legit bass exercise passed down from Jamerson? Now if only we had more than one decent video clip. What a world we live in, where there’s infinite footage of Lawrence Welk and only a meager clip or two of James Jamerson.
That’s such an awesome Video. I really love the simplicity and how it applies to most songs. It’s my go-to technique as it comes in very handy on a gig playing unfamiliar songs on request. lol.
The triplet only really makes sense if you’re doing the multiple-string-crossing-while-raking thing, which is how Jamerson (I think) decided to include it in the original exercise.
The way the pattern laid out in the key of B, it didn’t make as much sense to me to try to get to the octave B in that bar, so there was nowhere to triplet “thick-it-dy bow” down from, so I just omitted it.
