Root Note Songs?

Three immediately come to mind where I just primarily bang out root notes . . .

Genesis - No Son of Mine
The Police - Every Breath You Take
Heart - All I Wanna Do (you'll have to change up the lyrics to come from a male perspective on this one tho)

Genesis (Abacab, for example) and The Police have several that are primarily root centered. You might look deeper into their catalog.

 

Just throwing this out there: You can always choose to play a song in this way. Just because McCartney was a mean cat genius doesn't mean that one must play those bass lines the same way. The songs will hold up.

 

As playing mostly all root notes is step one, with any song, and adding the 5 or some of the other chord tones are the gravy. You can dumb down most any rock song and just pound roots.

So pick the songs you would like to sing. If you are singing your voice is carrying the melody and your bass is accompanying your vocals. Some time a root at the chord change and then nothing more until the next chord change will be enough and does a good job of accenting the lyrics you (or someone else) is singing. Especially on slow ballads, if you need more add more.

So again, pick a song you would like to sing, if you find it to be more complicated than you can handle, pick another. The songs you pick should be songs you want to sing, not something I like to sing.

top 100 rock songs of all time vh1 - Bing

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Chords)


Happy trails.

 

Break Up Song
Summer of 69
Two tickets to paradise
Mony Mony
ROCK In The USA

Lots of rock songs can be just played with roots.

 

Everyday People - one bass root note beginning to end. It's the only song I can think of that has a bass line with just one note all the way through.