Breaking out of pentatonic boxes

[HolmeBass]

This is where rehearsals are valuable, try out different notes and use your ears to see what works. Remember that what you right after a particularly “tense” tone or set of tones can make it work.

Chances are your bandmates are not listening closely enough to even notice most of the time.

 

[BassBrass]

Listen to Coltrane everyday (from the Elvin Jones band on) and 20th century classical music like Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Charles Ives and Karl Orff.
Also check out Ravi Shankar and other Indian masters. I won't mention Ornette Coleman, but things that have nothing to do with your pentatonic boxes.

 

[Fuzzbass]

I was mostly stuck in the pentatonic rut* as a beginning/intermediate player. Long story short, I got a recommendation to take lessons from a guitarist who taught me how to play in any scale, any mode, any position on the fretboard. This was decades ago, and did not include the CAGED concept. Still, it was exactly what I needed to get out of my rut.


*The major and minor pentatonic scales are fantastic for beginners. I'm including the six-note "pentatonic blues" scales, which include an extra passing tone (it's the flat five in pentatonic minor). But yeah, to progress as a bassist (and musician), you'll need to work on the seven-note modes. From there you can work on crazier alterations, along with 6 note whole tone, 8 note diminished, etc etc etc.

 

[Pings Bass]

Start thinking in chords instead of scales, including substitutions, inversions, alterations and extensions. Especially if you're playing without a piano and with guitarists chunking on I-IV-V power chords, you can introduce some real melodic and harmonic interest playing arpeggios that take it a little outside.

 

[Fuzzbass]

Listen to Coltrane everyday (from the Elvin Jones band on) and 20th century classical music like Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Charles Ives and Karl Orff.
Also check out Ravi Shankar and other Indian masters. I won't mention Ornette Coleman, but things that have nothing to do with your pentatonic boxes.

Okay... I like your response, but it won't be helpful to the OP's immediate concern. This music is so advanced, and players like Coltrane might be soloing over multiple tonal centers simultaneously.

Hell, I'm comfortable with the basic diatonic modes and certain alterations, but when I listen to late period Coltrane I feel like I know nothing. Which is kind of cool, actually: I don't try to analyze, I just relax and enjoy. But the point is, I'm not learning anything from it.

 

[Shenron]

So I find when I am playing and we're jamming I often times get stuck or rooted in 1 position in a pentatonic box. I'd like to vary my playing or create lines that are. Bit more interesting. What's the best way to do this?

IMHO the easiest ways are:

1) combining 2 adjacent boxes

2) adding a higher note on the 2 highest strings, and a lower note on the 2 lowest strings

 

[AngelCrusher]

on a side note hexatonics are really fun. Kinda like triads with a color notes. C D E G B or C D E G A

You need to learn the penatonic scale across the entire fretboard. It sounds like you are just playing one shape in one area. Thats the easy starting point. You want to get to the point where you are able to slide up past multiple shapes to grab notes all over the board. So if you are playing in shape 1, which you most likely are, you can work on going from shape 1 to 2, to 3 to 4., 4 to 5. Then once you have that down, you go from shape 1 to shape 3, shape 2 to shape 4, shape 5 to shape 3....etc. Lots of videos on this, watch Rich Browns.

Definitely a fundamental part of bass playing. You also need to be able to do this with the major scale.

I would not add 2 notes to the pentatonic yet. It doesn't sound like you are there. Keep it simple, learn the pentatonic across the entire neck until you can play it in your sleep. Once you get to that point, learn the major scale the same way.

Also adding more notes does not really change the fact that you probably don't have good patterns under your fingers if you are staying in one shape the whole time. The best players have a total mastery of pentatonics to where they can harmonize chords with them. I will not get into that yet, because it's more advanced.

 

[Acoustic356]

You have so many options.

1. Intervals
2. Triads
3. Chord Tones
4. Pentatonics
5. Modes
6. Understanding chord theory
7. Chromatics

Scales over Chords by Hal Leonard is a good way to introduce you to the topics. It's a really well written book with excellent examples that will open your mind to great possibilities.

 

[Wasnex]

Yes I am familiar with theory, and I know the modes, and scales and all. I just wind up getting to comfortable in the box and am looking for ways to get out of that more so than anything

I am a bit confused as to why someone who understands theory would have this problem. If you understand theory, the solution is slow down and think about what you are doing instead of going on autopilot and relying exclusively on box patterns. There is nothing wrong with using basic box patterns, but it's a fairly basic and limiting way to understand music. You have apparently hit a wall.

When I am playing bass, my mind tends to cycle through a range of different mental processes. At a given moment I might think about chord tones, the key center, scale tones, box shapes, intervals, some sort of substitution or alteration strategy, etc. To choose notes I may rely on my knowledge of theory or I may use my ears. When I am learning new material I may have to stop and do an analysis of what's going on to figure out how to build a good bass line. Sometimes I might stop and study a couple of bars to figure out how to create something new as well. The point is, I am not just relying on a single automated script.

Music theory is really something you can study for a lifetime. You may forget and relearn some things, or you may learn something fresh and new. When I majored in music, the learning process was something like this: attend lecture, study text and lecture notes, apply new concepts through writing (assisted by piano), translate new ideas to bass. By learning and studying a new concepts, you can expand the available scripts you can draw on to play in a different way. However to use these scripts in a live playing situation, you have to build them and practice them till they happen automatically. This take time and effort.

There are strategies where you can play outside with pentatonic scales:

The following video sort of spoon feeds a strategy for playing outside with pentatonics.

 

[Prodigus Filius]

Introduce playing horizontally on one string using any note in the scale up or down. Leaps, consecutive. Get into string pairing playing the scale. Takes you up and down the neck diagonally instead of the same old vertical. E.g Am pentatonic . Play G and A on the low E string, than C D E on the A string. Than G and A on the D string. Then C D E on the G string.
Using string pairs again and horizontally play mini 4 notes patterns e.g Am pentatonic play A and C on E string.Then D and E on the A string. Then C and D on E string and E G on A string. Then D And E on E string and G and A on A string. Then E and G on E string and A and C on A string. Then G and A on E string and C and D on A string
Give some air time to playing the scale in the other 4 shapes vertically and Start to see the 5 shapes as one big whole

 

[BassBrass]

Okay... I like your response, but it won't be helpful to the OP's immediate concern. This music is so advanced, and players like Coltrane might be soloing over multiple tonal centers simultaneously.

Hell, I'm comfortable with the basic diatonic modes and certain alterations, but when I listen to late period Coltrane I feel like I know nothing. Which is kind of cool, actually: I don't try to analyze, I just relax and enjoy. But the point is, I'm not learning anything from it.

You are right about the usefulness of listening to other harmonic systems, but when music takes me to another place, I don't need it to sound like a balanced equation, nor do I need to understand the equation. The mere tone of Coltrane's sax does that for me.
My interests in music are 1. sound/texture 2. melody 3. rhythm, then finally harmony if it happens ...that's why I love Karl Orff. He does the same thing. So does lots of rock music.
A powerful effective riff does not have to balance, sometimes the lack of balance if why it's noticeable.
Brian Eno wrote a thing called Oblique Strategies specifically designed for musicians to get out of their boxes and body patterns.
One of them is: Honor thy error as intentional. (an old jazz aphorism too) I think that's very important.
In other words, just try things.

 

[drewphishesp]

I know music theory insofar as I know the fingerings of the different modes and the different shapes of multiple scales. I just get stuck in 1 spot when I'm improvising or jammin. I think doing some workouts up and down the neck will help me get out of the rut. And start incorporating some modal notes as well

 

[HolmeBass]

You are right about the usefulness of listening to other harmonic systems, but when music takes me to another place, I don't need it to sound like a balanced equation, nor do I need to understand the equation. The mere tone of Coltrane's sax does that for me.
My interests in music are 1. sound/texture 2. melody 3. rhythm, then finally harmony if it happens ...that's why I love Karl Orff. He does the same thing. So does lots of rock music.
A powerful effective riff does not have to balance, sometimes the lack of balance if why it's noticeable.
Brian Eno wrote a thing called Oblique Strategies specifically designed for musicians to get out of their boxes and body patterns.
One of them is: Honor thy error as intentional. (an old jazz aphorism too) I think that's very important.
In other words, just try things.

Playing mistakes right is a real art form. That doesn’t quite scan correctly - what I mean is you play an unintentional note that creates a lot of tension, don’t panic. Try to resolve it with the next few notes that you play.

 

[mambo4]

I know music theory insofar as I know the fingerings of the different modes and the different shapes of multiple scales. I just get stuck in 1 spot when I'm improvising or jammin. I think doing some workouts up and down the neck will help me get out of the rut. And start incorporating some modal notes as well

"more scales" is not the answer to your problem imho ,
that will just give you bigger boxes, but maybe that's what you want

Multiple posts suggest you convert from thinking in scales to thinking chords; I think this is the best path out of "boxes"
For composing or improvising supportive bass lines, you must understand chords, chord tones and chord progressions.
The PDF in my signature spells it all out

 

[drewphishesp]

I can't see the pdf. But yes I'm going to do that

 

[Paul New]

Get out of that box!

 

[Bass Motifs]

If you're only concerned with breaking out of a single position, this is a killer exercise:

Great clip, I love Rich Brown's stuff.

I'd guess that most box players dont know their fretboard. Very much my own experience. The two things that helped me were:

(1) learning the octaves of some key notes, so you can start shifting registers or playing same the same groups of notes in different fingering configurations which opens up new phrasings.

(2) playing with major pentatonics in the pattern that makes you shift up and down the fingerboard. For example, G, A, B where G is first finger on E string, you shift up on either the A or B, and then move across to next string etc. That gets your hands moving because you can't stay in a box. You can blend minor blues pentatonics into that too, combining two types of pentatonic shapes.

That's really fun, because you can do lots of melodic fills that land on the next harmony note. The major pentatonics seem to overlap and join up other chords better than minor ones on most tunes.

None of that requires any fancy music theory, and I wish I'd cottoned on to it earlier.

 

[Pacman]

Rich Brown is the best instructor regarding using pentatonics that I have seen on internet, he really takes it to a different level than most. Almost everything he does is based on pentatonic scales and how to manipulate the shapes. Most of his material is oriented to how to do creative things with this scale.

Jimmy Haslip also does almost everything using pentatonics. I had a fantastic lesson with him and he told me pentatonics, dorian mode and what he called the double diminished scale (half/whole) are the keys to everything for him.

 

[BassicJazzy]

There are a lot of really good ideas and approaches outlined in many of the preceding posts, and I think that almost all of them would be helpful to the OP, but in small doses. Being knowledgeable and comfortable moving around the fretboard is key to implementing any of the more advanced ideas. If the OP becomes comfortable then transition outside the box will happen without conscious thought. It is helpful to know your anchor and pivot points for whatever key and or chord and or scale tones you may be using. It's also best not to overthink things. You can wrapped up sideways in modes and diminished scales, or chromatics since rules change depending on what form you are playing. I find that sometimes it's best to just let your fingers decide where to go, what to do. Stare straight ahead, clear your mind, use your ears. Overthinking theory and trying to get too far ahead of yourself can be crippling.

But that's just me.

 

[MVE]

I too used to rely heavily on pentatonic for any soloing. (For blues and funk, I still do.) But learning to play the concepts discussed in this video about MILLPAD really helped me to improvise melodies using all of the modes in a more musical way.

Its a little hard to follow at first, but once you get it in your head (and more importantly, under your fingers) you will be able to start a phrase from any degree of a scale, or from the root of the chord and stay in key and stay musical while you noodle up or down as your heart leads you.