I am REALLY wanting to get into Walking Jazz bass...I have Ed Friedlands book and am going through that 30 mins a day....but I want more....what else can I do during my practice time to help my progress???

I am REALLY wanting to get into Walking Jazz bass...I have Ed Friedlands book and am going through that 30 mins a day....but I want more....what else can I do during my practice time to help my progress???

If you understand the basic concepts of Walking bass, chord tones, approach notes, scales, skips, and so on. Then a good thing to do with write Walking lines and then play them. Edit as needed. When doing it away from the instrument you can think a little more about WHY you are playing a note, what you think it will sound like, shape of the line and so on. So take a Jazz Standard and depending on how far you are along write out a section or the whole tune. Then play it and edit any clunkers. Don't worry about writing a master piece becasue you will keep doing it. Do a few lines for a song, you will start finding sounds that you like and become part of your playing. Then pick another tune.

This makes for a good way to practice when away from your instrument. You can always make up lines in your head and check them out later.

This is a good exeercise for working on improv too sit and write out a solo. This one I still do with and without the instrument, but sitting and writing out stuff thinking about why you are playing something is a great learning tool, because the more you do it the faster you get at it and next thing you know your able to do it on the bandstand. You have the ear-brain-fingers connection working in real time.

Get Todd Johnson's Walking Bass DVD series and get Band in a Box.
Band in a Box is awesome piece of software to use as backing tracks. You can type in your chords, pick a style and let it rip. I found it to be the most useful tool. Do some research on it. I actually believe you can download a demo version of it.
Have fun.

For free stuff, check out this:

http://www.talkbass.com/wiki/index.php/Walk_With_Me_-_Walking_Bass_Lines

Also, I like Rufus Reid's book/DVD set called "The Evolving Bassist":

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000GAKJOQ/104-0052081-5281547?ie=UTF8&redirect=true

He follows the approach described by DocBop, and shows the approach in real time on the DVD.

Oh yeah, and I second the recommendation for Band in a Box. I use it almost daily.

Bruce Gertz's book "Walkin" is a pretty much the perfect example of DocBop's "writing out musical lines" technique. Each line in the book is a finely crafted quarter note melody, illustrating scalar and chromatic approaches.

Memorizing a couple choruses from the book over blues, rhythm changes...etc..etc would be a good place to start as a jump off point for creating your own quarter note melodic statements.


As far as something you can implement in your practice, you can try different digital patterns for the chords to help you hear possibilities.

Over any chord you can try things like:
1-3-5-7
1-7-5-3
3-5-7-1
3-1-5-7
5-3-1-7
5-7-1-3
1-2-3-5
etc...etc...etc...

There are a limitless number of combinations you can try over any chord quality. A Berklee teacher named Dave Clark gave me a whole sheet of them, which he called "Clearing Patterns for Jazz". Once again, they are just digital patterns which can provoke your ear and give you options. The ultimate goal is to be making musical statements, singing and swinging.

TRANSCRIBE TRANSCRIBE TRANSCRIBE.

Jazz is all progressions of ii-V-I

So to play a jazz song in Dmaj:

Start with Em7. Then walk to A7. then walk down to Dmaj7


Get a Real book, Get a music sequencer like the Yamaha QY or the Band in a Box (http://www.pgmusic.com/)computer program, program in the Real book songs in, and then play all night.

Band In a Box is great for this. I started with walking by taking "All The Things You Are", taking the chord sheet, and first started going through it playing 1 and 5 with a 2 feel for all chords, then going through and playing the the quarter notes as 4 note arpeggios, both up and down. Now I'm starting to use chromatic notes to get between the chords, next up in using the different inversions for each chord. I've just picked up bass, so for me this also gets me familiar with a lot of the scales and note location on the fretboard besides walking in general. BTW, I didn't come up with this on my own, my teacher has had me working on this tune for a few weeks now. Good luck.

Adam

Long time ago, lent my bass to a guy at a party who proceeded to play impressive walking lines. I asked him how he learned to do it, and he said, simply:

"transcribe Ray Brown"