Double Bass Hearing Chord Changes

Just play as much as you can with others and listen to as much music as you can. If you are jamming frequently with others, your ear will naturally sharpen and you will begin to feel certain changes and phrases. Another trick for bluegrass is to learn the fingerings that guitarists use for basic chords and watch them as they play.

Ditto what Jim said. Nothing beats just plain old familiarity with the genre...it's always been my saving grace that I tend to dive into a style headlong and really focus on it, both playing and listening. It's really helped me.

I'm also lucky, too, that the guitar player in my bluegrass/roots/country band is also a great bassist and I can tell where he's headed almost to the point of telepathy.

Here's the tip I learned from Rufus Reid's book: stand behind the piano player and watch his left hand. I always felt like I was cheating doing this, but once I read it, I felt validated. Its a great way to figure out the basics of a tune, as the piano player will tend to play more left hand until the bass line is swinging. Or I guess the real point is to watch whoever is most familiar with the tune closely at first (a time or two through or whatever).

Originally posted by George Lenz
I don't play with a piano anymore but sometimes I have watched the rhythm guitar players hands like Jim said at the top. Sometimes that's one of those necessary evils you have to do to survive a song you don't know. The problem is that by the time you see where they are going and then you go there your bass note is a late and behind the beat. This is especially bad in bluegrass where you need to be on top of or a hair ahead of the beat. This is a big part of what gives bluegrass it's drive and makes it go. This is one thing we all need to keep an eye on so it does't become a bad habit no matter what kind of music you are playing.

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George, I wouldn't jump in here if you were a jazz or orchestral player because I could fill a big book up with things that I DON'T know about those genres of music.

On the other hand, I do know something about bluegrass after over 40 years of playing it.

First and foremost, unless you know the melody of the song well enough to sing, whistle or hum it, either out loud or in your head, there is no way that you can possibly do a walking line over all the chord changes.

Stated simply, if you don't know the tune, you simply cannot play it. You particularly cannot play a walking line because if you don't know where the tune is going you cannot possibly know where a walking line is going.

I play walking bass on practically every song that I play in performance. Untill I learn the song, I stick to root five.

If I don't know the song, I simply ask for the chord progression and hope I can remember it through the course of the song. If there are more than 3 chords in the song, I usually can't. I don't need to remember if I can see the guitarist' left hand.

Granted, the chord changes on the bass may be one beat late with this method but by treating the late beat as an accidental, a walk between chord changes sounds OK untill you get the song down cold. This usually only takes a couple of verses with bluegrass because bluegrass is comparitively very simple.

Another thing that I keep in mind:, How many bluegrass songs need a walking bass line all the way through the song? It usually makes for a better bass line to do a full walking bass line on the instrumental breaks only, anyway. Don't want to be TOO busy with the bass line.

Pkr2

George, something tells me that your knowledge is better than you might believe. Great to strive to be better but there's lots of value in giving yourself all the credit you deserve, too. Confidence is a powerful tool.

Heh so THAT'S what it is when I play a song in the wrong key! An experiment!

Originally posted by George Lenz
Maybe it's just that some people seem to be more gifted at hearing chord changes than others. I notice this especially when somebody does a song that they wrote and I know that nobody in the group has ever played it before. I've been playing about 8 years and I'm getting better but still a long ways from where I want to be.

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I don't know anything about bluegrass, but I can relate to these comments about walking lines and learning changes from trying to play Jazz for about the last 4 years.

I go along to Jazz workshops every week and often there is more than one bassplayer - so you get to compare notes and assess your own standard etc.
Generally, people expect that given the age I am, that I will know loads of Jazz standards and have things worked out to play, but as I have only taken up Jazz recently I know very few compared with most Jazz bass players I meet.

But when we get an original tune and especially something that is different from the "norm" I often find I am doing better than other more experienced players or at least am on the same level. I find I am hungry for new structures and sets of changes, but often get bored with simpler ones and struggle to find new things to do that interest me.

So this leads to strange situations where one week I am treated like a virtual beginner, as I am struggling with a standard that most Jazz bass players have played hundreds or thousands of times before and have loads of variations and solid walking lines already in their heads.

Whereas other weeks it's completely the opposite. So for example, there was a workshop with a trumpter/bandleader who brought along all original tunes he had written and arranged himself, which really inspired me and he asked for my phone number for when he needed a bassplayer when he was touring Europe - he's Swedish!

Both situations are sort of unsatisfactory to me, as I'm not really ready for true professional status but being considered a beginner has a kind of demotivating effect on me. I've talked to my Jazz tutor and he say that you have to be able to play good stuff on a 12 bar blues or a simple standard.

But I suspect that a lot of the experienced bass players in Jazz are relying on their experience and apply this to sequences and know what will keep the rest of the band happy in certain situations. It's not a question of them "hearing the changes" any better than someone else; but rather that they have heard things like this many times before and can guess where it's going very easily. But if you gave them something unorthodox, they would be back in the same place as the rest of us who have less experience.

[It's not a question of them "hearing the changes" any better than someone else; but rather that they have heard things like this many times before and can guess where it's going very easily. ]Quote by Bruce

Very well said, Bruce. That concept holds up very well in bluegrass music as well. When you mentally kick out everything that wont work, the choices become much fewer.


Having listened to your sound clip in an earlier post, I think you may be selling yourself a bit short.


Pkr2

Hey, George, you have already gotten a lot of great answers from the DB guys down here.

I just wanted to see how things are in Heber. I lived there for a couple of years back in the early 80's.

George, I'm not trying to be the wet blanket and pardon me if I'm repeating the obvious or previously-stated: Learning to read music and learning music theory really help you "hear" changes on-the-fly. Understanding "why" things sound is, at the minimum, an enormous help to understanding "how" changes sound.