Yeah, walking bass is much harder than it first appears. I still haven’t cracked that nut yet, and I suspect it boils down to taking some relatively straightforward standards (Autumn Leaves, There is No Greater Love, …) and play walking lines along their changes again and again and again… and again.
I know, repetition is necessary in many learning instances, but even more so with walking bass.
I have been working through Mark Smith’s Walking Bass courses and Autumn Leaves is prominently covered in depth because it’s such a renowned jazz standard.
Improvising jazz walking bass lines requires a strong working knowledge of chord tones and how to seamlessly connect them melodically. Obviously, no two players’ lines will be the same (even ONE player’s lines will not be identical when played from instance to instance).
That said, in the case of speaking any language, there are conventions regarding sentence structure, grammar and even pronunciation that people adhere to as they express ideas to others. Very similar conventions apply to expressing musical ideas via walking bass improvs.
Bottom line, it’s much easier to describe than it is to actually do. It takes a lot of study and practice to even begin, but the path is more than worth the effort for those who want to do it.
Hi Everyone,
Nice to see a super healthy conversation going on over here. Since I last posted I’d been going through Janek Gwizdala’s ii-V-I, which I think is a very good book. Especially the first part, which are a ton of drills using different shapes for each chord. As I progressed the book became more and more dense, requiring a good understanding, of what are for me, advanced theory concepts. It was then that I gave in and decided to take a deep dive into chord tones. I was relying too much on shapes and that wasn’t cutting it for me. I highly recommend Mark Smiths chord tone course. It doesn’t leave anything out and goes bit by to get you on your way to knowing chords. He also had drills for doing 2 octave chords working up the neck on way path and back down using a different path. I’ve pretty much completed the course, and I’ve incorporated his ‘Spelling Drills’ exercise into my daily practice. The result was pretty mind blowing. My next step is to go through the Ed Friedland book that gets into the ‘language’ of walking bass lines.
An interesting thing has happened since I started my journey. As a fellow member said above, getting from one destination to the next is where a lot of trouble resides and that is true, but, for me now, it’s also becoming the place that is most interesting.
I have the Ron Carter “Building Jazz Bass Lines” and Hal Leonard “Building Walking Bass Lines” books as PDFs which I can share for reference purposes-but I would prefer not to get inundated by everyone in the next couple of hours.
No Audio files for them tho
Talking Bass Chord Tones Essentials is not fun or easy, but it is essential to knowing how bass lines are structured, and why. It takes work to get through it, but it’s worth the effort.
I couldn’t agree with you more @MikeC.