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Agreed, and I’ve noticed that is another reason bass solos are hard to pull off well in jazz combos. If the bass player is soloing then probably nobody is outlining the changes and the band can easily get lost. A solution is where somebody else in the group is aware and deliberately paces the changes - Chick Corea was masterful at this; he would play just enough behind soloists to remind everyone where they were. Or as a bass soloist you can play something that doesn’t venture too far harmonically from the changes, at risk of it being a little boring.
There are admittedly a few blues songs with iconic bass parts that make each sing what it is. “Born Under a Bad Sign” is an example - if you don’t play the right bassline there, the band is essentially playing a different song.
But you’re right. In 2013 I played a private party in a big band group; there was a blues band flying in to play a late set and their bass player missed his flight. I was able to sit in and get through the set; it got me lots of great conversation afterward but the reality is that out of maybe a dozen songs 8 or 9 were straightforward 12-bar. Fun night though.
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I am staying far away from any solos for now, even with the jazz group. I don't have the confidence yet.
On that note (ha), I have noticed that the other folks in the jam group I mentioned, do what is being described there. The keyboard and guitar players will, for example, outline the chord changes while others solo. That's one reason I think it is a good group, and I keep going back.
On that note (ha), I have noticed that the other folks in the jam group I mentioned, do what is being described there. The keyboard and guitar players will, for example, outline the chord changes while others solo. That's one reason I think it is a good group, and I keep going back.
Oh for sure!
Duck Dunn was a legend and made those songs great! I agree some of those songs have origins of being patterns but those patterns made the songs so darn good that I agree you have to stay true sometimes to the original. "Oh Pretty Woman" by Albert King with Duck Dunn also I argue as well is one of those must play the original because it is just so fitting!
Yep, in an all-IEM band like this, it’s all computerized and if the system breaks down there is no gig. We don’t even bring cabinets for stage amps, so we couldn’t fall back on that. There is some risk.
On the other hand, every player’s part is available in the backing tracks if needed. Technically if one or even a couple band members missed the gig, we would just cue on that backup part and be fine. Obviously, also pretty clinical.
I too started out following swing and jazz charts. My experience has generally been styles with improvised lines, but I have done covers with a degree of specificity in the bass line ( Low Rider, Shaft, I wish, and so forth).
I did not learn these bar by bar & note by note.
I learned 85%-90% of what the recording was doing, and used chart reading / theory / stylistic vocabulary to fill in the blanks.
I usually created my own charts following this process.
for me, writing things out seals my memory quite effectively.
Usually the lines did not need to be prefect, but they needed to be recognizable as a particular song.
It is something to be done with care. I witnessed a cover of Brick House Where the player left off the syncopated 8th note anticipation at the end of the phrase and boy did that bother me. The crowd did not notice or care. So maybe it was good enough?
Anyway, memorize lots of material , for me, means write it out.
Also, the more you do it the more common patterns enter your vocabulary
speeding things up significantly.
As does pop and rock, (and jazz as you know).
Understanding common chord progressions is extremely useful.
How is your theory? that roman numeral I-IV-V (or Nashville numbers) stuff?
Can you recognize how C Am F G7 and Eb Cm Ab Bb7 are the same progression?
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I don't know, seems to me like the pay'd need to be awful good for that kind of assembly line performance.
I agree 100%. For me, reproducing other player's lines is counter to why I play music. I guess that I have been lucky in that I have always been involved with original projects that draw enough to support regular gigs.
Sort of but what I'm really getting at is that they are both a I-iv-IV-V7 progression, one is in the key of C maj and one in Eb maj
A lot of songs "kind of sound the same" even if they are in different keys, because they have the same functional harmony.
It's Like thinking of scale tones a 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 instead of C, D, E ,F, G, A, B releases you from thinking of specific notes.
Functional harmony unhooks you from having to know specific chords to reproduce a tune, and to change keys on the fly.
It's why so many blues tunes can sound interchangeable - it's all I -IV -V progressions.
Also, I have found that when it comes to ear training, memorizing the sounds of functional progressions is easier than intervals or static harmony.
My favorite is comparing the verse of Stand By Me to Every Breath You Take
Pop and Rock songs may sound unique but the same functional chord progressions show up all the time.
Just like Jazz.
A popular example form 14 years ago
The theory needed to understand this is in the PDF linked in my signature
I play in one of the same bars with that band and also a chopsy original Steely Dan-meets-Jamiroquai thing I did for several years. Musically the originals gig was much more fun, to your point. But the party rock band puts so many people in this joint that sometimes we didn’t leave the stage during breaks because there was nowhere to stand. That many people all singing “BA-BA-BAAA” in Sweet Caroline is its own kind of fun.
Even if most of the kids in there are my daughter’s age, that part is weird.
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I have it on good authority that this means you don't gig much. Sorry for the bad news!
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Right, and a lot of pop songs are basically the same chords (or at least same relationship) as Pachabel's Canon in D. we must watch a lot of the same YouTube vids ha
I get you, and yes I'm at least aware of most of this stuff, and working on learning more!
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I was gonna chime in a longer answer but no point.
As someone who has been playing bass in straight ahead, spiritual modal jazz, ECM Scandi, Latin, raga, avant garde and blues genres both on electric ad upright - I keep this guiding principle when it comes to improvisation.
"If you can't play in, you can't really play out"
If you have to pedal one note for 10 minutes or more, you can use that opportunity as a meditative session.
I play saxophone too! and usually expected to improvise except when hired to be in the horn sections.
BW - There is a new Coltrane release called the Complete Sunship Sessions. Very interesting , you can hear short snippets of improvising sessions and John and other folks would discuss the improvisations. So stoked to hear the guys talk and captured on tape.
As someone who has been playing bass in straight ahead, spiritual modal jazz, ECM Scandi, Latin, raga, avant garde and blues genres both on electric ad upright - I keep this guiding principle when it comes to improvisation.
"If you can't play in, you can't really play out"
If you have to pedal one note for 10 minutes or more, you can use that opportunity as a meditative session.
I play saxophone too! and usually expected to improvise except when hired to be in the horn sections.
BW - There is a new Coltrane release called the Complete Sunship Sessions. Very interesting , you can hear short snippets of improvising sessions and John and other folks would discuss the improvisations. So stoked to hear the guys talk and captured on tape.
If anyone wants any music played exact they should supply a chart, if not they should use players that bring something of their own to a piece...after all if anyone can play it as recorded then they do not need you.
As for learning songs, chart them out and save the chart.
If you have a dep, you get paid once not for time on the gig, but for your time on learning the songs, so by charting them out you have a future record to read through if that dep comes up again. All the chart does is tell you what to play, you do not have to remember and re-learn songs you have already played...and have been paid already to do.
Each gigs is a repeat payout for you time in learning....not playing.
When i have to do this i just read the charts in the days before the gig, no instrument involved as i know how to play.... what i am doing is remembering what to play and how a song goes.
Also the act of writing out a chart, be it just chord sheets or notes, helps you learn a song better as you have to keep rewinding the song to get each line....so in a way you are breaking it down into smaller chunks rather than one big part.
I can't know everything you're doing or studying, but I get a sense (and this is from someone who only played read-off-the-page classical music for years in my piano training) you need to spend at least some time away from the books and begin to develop hearing and playing things by ear, at least in part.
For a great part of my life, I could read both clefs like the Sunday newspaper. But I was utterly lost if I had to improvise even half a measure, much less hear a song and play it on the fly by ear RIGHT NOW.
It became obvious to me I no longer wanted to be held prisoner by the written page, and as I got into playing bass in bands, rarely was anything written out, or often not even chord charts, it was often only 'head' charts, all by memory and ear. This was a 180-dgree change in mindset and how I played music.
And I realized at the same time, my ears were useless for anything except a place to hang my glasses, I couldn't hear chords and chord changes properly, and even more aggravatingly after years of playing all kinds of scales over and over, I could barely pick them out in songs.
Once my ears 'came in' everything made a lot more sense. I could look at a score and know what it was going to sound like instead of having to play it first. I'd get on an 'uncharted' gig and I could visualize the unwritten chart as I was playing a tune by ear.
In the 70's and 80's when the Top 40 charts in rock and country were more prevalent, I often stayed roughly current by always listening to the radio. I became the guy (lifelong sober) that bands called in an emergency when their bass player didn't show, drank his way out of job, etc., I often got called late in the day, had to show up to a club at 9, they'd holler the keys at me for each tune, and we were off to the races for the next 4 or 5 hours, and often I did pretty well at it as I'd watch them like a hawk and listen to them to hear where they were going, and my ears filled in the blanks. Admittedly on relatively simple radio music, but still they'd go away happy and I got a few gigs that way.
You want to be sure the intellectual side and the playing side of your work gets equal time. Ultimately, it's got to be fun. Too much work and time spent for it not to be.
For a great part of my life, I could read both clefs like the Sunday newspaper. But I was utterly lost if I had to improvise even half a measure, much less hear a song and play it on the fly by ear RIGHT NOW.
It became obvious to me I no longer wanted to be held prisoner by the written page, and as I got into playing bass in bands, rarely was anything written out, or often not even chord charts, it was often only 'head' charts, all by memory and ear. This was a 180-dgree change in mindset and how I played music.
And I realized at the same time, my ears were useless for anything except a place to hang my glasses, I couldn't hear chords and chord changes properly, and even more aggravatingly after years of playing all kinds of scales over and over, I could barely pick them out in songs.
Once my ears 'came in' everything made a lot more sense. I could look at a score and know what it was going to sound like instead of having to play it first. I'd get on an 'uncharted' gig and I could visualize the unwritten chart as I was playing a tune by ear.
In the 70's and 80's when the Top 40 charts in rock and country were more prevalent, I often stayed roughly current by always listening to the radio. I became the guy (lifelong sober) that bands called in an emergency when their bass player didn't show, drank his way out of job, etc., I often got called late in the day, had to show up to a club at 9, they'd holler the keys at me for each tune, and we were off to the races for the next 4 or 5 hours, and often I did pretty well at it as I'd watch them like a hawk and listen to them to hear where they were going, and my ears filled in the blanks. Admittedly on relatively simple radio music, but still they'd go away happy and I got a few gigs that way.
You want to be sure the intellectual side and the playing side of your work gets equal time. Ultimately, it's got to be fun. Too much work and time spent for it not to be.
For the OP - your question is a valid one. I'll chime in with my experience. I've been part of a band now for 2 yrs that is a cover band, but not typical stuff at all, and while I was somewhat familiar with some of it (Sting, Beatles) much of it was stuff that I did not know. Think Wood Brothers, Darrel Scott, Chris Stapleton. Its a great set of players in the band so I put in the work to learn the tunes. I found charts for most of the stuff from Ultimate Guitar and other online sources, then downloaded recordings and played along until I learned the tunes. All of it went in an iPad using the BandHelper app, which we still use as a band for setlists. I used the iPad during gigs for the first year or so if I needed a reminder of song info (key signature, quirky parts, etc) but now know most if it by heart through multiple times playing as a band. Its alot of work but I enjoy the music and it was a really good learning experience for me. Some of the tunes have bass parts that I reproduce pretty closely each time - one example is "Something", the Beatles classic. The bass line is complicated and makes the song. So I downloaded the part in bass clef notation and read it through multiple times - I still glance at it once in a while as its such a great part, but tricky.
If I were in your situation, would I be driving 2 hrs for rehearsals, let alone gigs? No way, but its been a great learning experience for me. By comparison, the band that I was in before this one was a NewGrass band, gigged all the time and never rehearsed. It was fun but didn't advance me much as a player.
If I were in your situation, would I be driving 2 hrs for rehearsals, let alone gigs? No way, but its been a great learning experience for me. By comparison, the band that I was in before this one was a NewGrass band, gigged all the time and never rehearsed. It was fun but didn't advance me much as a player.
I don't have much to add to what others have suggested re memorization, but as far as transposing to different keys (and this may have been mentioned already) this is a great example of how useful it is to use a numbers system when making your charts. You already know chords, intervals, etc. Simplest example: instead of writing your A D E chords for that tune in A as letter names, write 'em I IV V. Then you can easily shift to any key. Somehow I also find being in the numbers mindset helps when I have to learn and memorize a bunch of material quickly (though YMMV on that !).
