Conflicting advice on walking bass

[mambo4]

Some of my better walking bass lines occur when I get lost in the chord changes and I'm hanging on for dear life. I wouldn't recommend that as a "method" though.

gotta admit i kind of love those moments
Wait where are we in this chart
what chord is it oh god I have no idea
I'll just play like I mean it until I get back on track
relying on ears and instinct
And that moment you fall back in is such a tremendous relief
and everybody in the band laughs
and the audience has no clue how lost you were
because jazz

of course those moments only work if you actually find you way back

 

[jthisdell]

"Root note on the 1, the rest are your choice".

I was in a gypsy jazz trio a few years ago and on some of the songs I would purposefully never play the 1 on some of the rounds through a verse chorus, just for grins to see if I could do it and what would happen if I did. So maybe the first time through I would start on the 1' the next time on the 3, then maybe the 5 or 6. That was a fun Band.

My rule on walking bass is to use a non-scale chromatic tone to go from one chord to another, so if you were traveling from 1 to 5 you could go 1,3,4,then the chromatic between the 4 and 5 then to the 5.

 

[Drucifer]

5. Like an Egyptian

I cannot like this enough!

 

[Wasnex]

Rules of walking bass, yeah.....they all look pretty good in books. You’ll be surprised at what is played on recordings. Even straight ahead players like Ray Brown will stray pretty far from the initial chord sometimes.

The note choices will also vary greatly depending on the piano voicings.

My 2 cents.

Let's keep in mind that the jazz greats had a tendency to play off the page. By this I mean they did not necessarily stick to the chords on the page. The piano may substitute changes and pull the bass player in a different direction, or the bass player may substitute changes and pull the piano in a different direction. In my experience this can make it very difficult to analyze how a walking bass line makes sense.

I remember one of the books I was supposed to use for my professional development that included a bunch of transcribed walking lines written over chords. This book was from one of the greats (either Rufus Reid or Ray Brown), and many bass players speak really highly of it. I just found it confusing because many of the walking lines did not seem relate to the written changes, and I did not have a bass player mentor in the organization to explain what was going on. I believe the issue here is the transcription was done over the written changes rather than over the substitute changes that were actually played; and this is the way it's usually done AFAIK.

I don't consider most of what you learn in books to be rules. Rather most of it is strategies to break the rules in order to make the walking line more interesting and musical. As a developing player you learn a few basic rules, then you learn how to break them.

I learned most of what I do from playing along with recordings and actually doing the job. I had a few people teach me a few basic chord substitutions at some point, but pretty much everything else I have learned has been from copying recordings and working ideas out slowly to see what what I could make work.

Before I could read chord changes I played in a university big band for a couple of years by listening to and learning to play along with recordings of the arrangements we were doing. After that I three semesters of classical music theory, but no formal training on how to read jazz chord notation. I was pretty much self taught on how to build a walking line from a lead sheet. I bugged experienced players to teach me what the symbols meant, and then used my classical training and experience playing by ear to slowly learn how to read lead sheets.

 

[aprod]

Let's keep in mind that the jazz greats had a tendency to play off the page. By this I mean they did not necessarily stick to the chords on the page. The piano may substitute changes and pull the bass player in a different direction, or the bass player may substitute changes and pull the piano in a different direction. In my experience this can make it very difficult to analyze how a walking bass line makes sense.

I remember one of the books I was supposed to use for my professional development that included a bunch of transcribed walking lines written over chords. This book was from one of the greats (either Rufus Reid or Ray Brown), and many bass players speak really highly of it. I just found it confusing because many of the walking lines did not seem relate to the written changes, and I did not have a bass player mentor in the organization to explain what was going on. I believe the issue here is the transcription was done over the written changes rather than over the substitute changes that were actually played; and this is the way it's usually done AFAIK.

I don't consider most of what you learn in books to be rules. Rather most of it is strategies to break the rules in order to make the walking line more interesting and musical. As a developing player you learn a few basic rules, then you learn how to break them.

I learned most of what I do from playing along with recordings and actually doing the job. I had a few people teach me a few basic chord substitutions at some point, but pretty much everything else I have learned has been from copying recordings and working ideas out slowly to see what what I could make work.

Before I could read chord changes I played in a university big band for a couple of years by listening to and learning to play along with recordings of the arrangements we were doing. After that I three semesters of classical music theory, but no formal training on how to read jazz chord notation. I was pretty much self taught on how to build a walking line from a lead sheet. I bugged experienced players to teach me what the symbols meant, and then used my classical training and experience playing by ear to slowly learn how to read lead sheets.

I would say it is more expanding the rules than breaking the rules. They are reharmonizing on the fly.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Thanks for the correction Ed, I was typing too fast and too many E's.

So I take it you took lessons from him as well?
Dirk

 

[Ostie]

Unless you are playing reggae, then the 2 and the 4 are the strong beats.

 

[Ed Fuqua]

Thanks for the correction Ed, I was typing too fast and too many E's.

So I take it you took lessons from him as well?
Dirk

Yeah he was my private teacher when I was at Berklee...

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Cool,
John certainly helped my playing and reading chops more than anyone else.
He was also way cool to just hang with and talk to.
Dirk

 

[JMacBass65]

There are three ways to walk:

1. Like a scale
2. Like an arpeggio
3. Chromatically
4. A hybrid of the above

There are two directions to walk: up or down.

This means for a given chord change, you have 8 different ways to do it.

So in a typical 4/4 tune with a different chord every bar, this means you play root-walk-walk-walk, root...

For multiple bars of the same chord, noodle (using the three ways) until the last bar—then do root-walk-walk-walk, root.

If the chord changes every two beats, all you have time for is root-approach tone-root. (An approach tone is any note a half or whole step away from the root, in either direction).

My suggestion for those that are trying to get a handle on walking bass is play 1 2 3 5 of the chord ascending or 8 7 6 5 defending, to keep it simple and diatonic at first.
Next step would be play on beat 4 a half step away from the root of the next chord.
For a ii V I in C that would be for example
D E F Ab , G F E Db, C D E G , C B A G

Check out Paul Chamber and Ray Brown for example of great players of walking bass.

Thank you both for these very straight forward, grade school level explanations. I'm a self taught hack who has learned by ear, and still don't "know" what I am doing in many ways. Seeing these two posts have helped me see that I'm actually kinda on the right track.

 

[George Dennis]

I walk my bass twice a day unless it drank a whole lot of water on a hot day— on those days it may require an additional walk.

Wait, you take your bass for a walk?

...and how can you tell when it's had too much water?