Scales to Fills

[MVC bass player]

I got a question ive been memorizing my scales to try to make fills but i dont know how to make them into fills everybody just says practice your scales but how do you use them?

[Rockin Mike]

Noodle around in the scale starting and ending on a tone of the current chord in the song.
Listen and learn fills in favorite songs in the same style and base your ideas off them.
Don't overplay fills. They should serve to make the song sound right, not to show the amazing bass player.

[mambo4]

Originally Posted by Rockin Mike

Listen and learn fills in favorite songs in the same style and base your ideas off them.

this.
Never just learn to simply execute a bass line or riff:
Reverse engineer it: learn its key, what scales it uses, the chords it follows, the rhythm it uses.
Understand it, then use it in similar situations in your own playing.

[jmattbassplaya]

IME, scales make really horrible fills.

[elgecko]

Fast forward to 1:15 for a scale as a fill.

David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World

[FretlessMainly]

Originally Posted by jmattbassplaya

IME, scales make really horrible fills.

Do you mean note-to-note scales make horrible fills? Because most fills are scale-based in some fashion. This is one of those areas that some players have a tough time implementing - the difference between a note-to-note scale and choosing notes from a scale to create a fill. One of the most simple fills comes from the simple I IV V progression:

| C | F | G7 | fill: g a b
and back to C. This is hardly a horrible fill, but nor is it terribly interesting.

The key to creating a good fill is to choose notes from a scale (such as a minor pentatonic) and craft the fill using various intervals within the scale rather than just regurgitating the scale from scale degree 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, etc.

To aid in this scales should be practiced in all manners of intervals. The most simple variation is:

1 3 2 4 3 5 4 6 5 7 6 9 8. Repeat in reverse.

Then create all sorts of permutations, such as:

1 4 2 3 2 5 3 4 3 6 4 5 4 7 5 6 5 8 6 7 6 9 7 9 8. There are many more you can create to make things more musical.

[bkbirge]

Work your arpeggios more. Then you can throw in other scale tones in passing. Also, there are a lot of different scales but if you aren't working the blues scale then you need to do so.

A C blues scale:
C Eb F Gb G Bb C

Work it in all keys. Notice this scale has one less tone than a normal major/minor progression. Lots of licks are based on playing around with just that scale.

[slybass3000]

Pentatonics and Blues scales are totally perfect for that.