I’ve been hard at work, bent over my bright orange typewriter at BassBuzz HQ. The latest and greatest offering is an absolute behemoth of a Scales Article:
It’s a massive deep dive into scales.
A leviathan of scale work.
A juggernaut of scale knowledge.
It’s all done with lots of photos of me in a chef’s hat, and the constant analogy of cooking, recipes and ingredients.
This is not a ‘roll-through-it-in-an-afternoon’ type of experience.
It’s a massive dive into deep scale practice and knowledge and wisdom!
It is for beginners, but some of the material (the song riffs, in particular) may need to be skipped over.
Each scale chapter could be it’s own week or 2 worth of practice material, depending on your level of experience.
As always, I’m writing these hoping they bring new light and angles and understanding! Holler and let me know how it goes!!
Your feedback makes the next massive article better!
Oh that it were possible!!
I mean, it took me weeks just to find the chef’s hat and learn the proper way to pour salt on a bass!
Heck yeah.
Check out the article and lemme know if this makes any sense.
This is my 90% of the time jammin on the bass go-to scale shape - whether it’s major or minor pentatonic!
It’s the ultimate combination of cool sounds and smooth physical movements!
Really awesome @gio. Thank you for throwing this all together. The chef’s hat looks great. Any chance you could throw some 5 string chord charts up in there or is that too niche? I got my first a bit ago and I’m trying to not just use it as an awesome thumb rest / anchor point.
I must admit I didn’t quite understand what the shifted form was. Is it just a case of the one note shifted onto the higher string causing a shift in the position of the fretting hand? I struggled to see more than that in it.
It’s just a different position to play the scale in. There are often numerous positions to play a given scale. E.g. you can play the major scale starting with the middle finger, the first finger, or the pinky. Three different shapes for the same scale. You decide which to use based on the context of what you’re playing to get the most economy of motion.
Here’s the most succinct explanation I could find with a quick search. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually show you the shapes.
Edit: It helps when you learn a scale to learn the scale and arpeggio starting on each of these three fingers. Then no matter where you’re coming from and where you’re going, you’ll have a shape to fit with minimal shifting along the neck.
Thanks, yes, I’m familiar with playing scales in different positions etc. I just haven’t heard of anything before referring to a ‘shifted’ form. It doesn’t appear to be playing the scale in a different position but just that one note. I sorted of wondered if I was missing something as that didn’t seem a sufficiently changed thing to warrant a special name as it’s not the whole pattern that’s shifted; just the one note in it.
