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Using Geometric Shapes Within Your Bass Lines - Lesson with Scott Devine

devine

devine

Aug 22, 2006
388
53
www.scottsbasslessons.com
Disclosures
Owner: Scott's Bass Lessons
#1
Hey guys, time for another lesson... I'm on a roll at the moment lol!

This week I was teaching a guy who was simply AMAZING at reading music... seriously... he could make music by reading the dead flies on your windshield!

He's a professional bass player who mostly does theatre shows and musicals where reading music is an essential skill. But... he was really struggling with creating his own bass lines, grooves and fills.

I sat down with him and chatted for a while about what the issue could be, and within a few minutes it was obvious...

He was making the same old mistake many players do. In fact, in the past this is something I suffered from too.

Here's a clue... It's all about geometric shapes... ;)... Geometric shapes!?? Yep... Take a look at the lesson [Invalid or Expired Link Removed].

PS. Within this new lesson I'm using a funky backing track that you can download from my website... details are on the video.

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

Over and out,

Scott.
 
#3
Great lesson,
I really appreciate your no nonsense approach. Over the years I have been accused of being a pattern player more than once. It's nice to see this addressed in a positive light.

Thanks
 
#7
Great video!

When improvising, patterns are my fallback, and I'm pretty good at it. Arpeggios or pentatonic or diatonic scales or the "jazz" scale (pentatonic minor with a flatted 5th thrown in), I use them all and I can almost do it without thinking.

Other times, when I have time to think and we're trying to nail down a new song, I'll approach it differently and construct a line deliberately.

In your video, Scott, you said your student was great at reading. Back when I was starting out my teacher had me do a lot of scales and arpeggio excercises, and he drew all the "shapes" in my notebook. That has stuck in my mind even since. After I lost the notebook I picked up another one and wrote it all down again. My reading is for the birds; it takes me forever to get through a few bars, but once I get oriented I can lean on the patterns to get moving along.
 
#8
Thanks for posting this lesson. I never really thought about playing in patterns before but after watching it I realize that this is something that I do naturally. I've subcribed to your site and can't wait to dive in to see what new tricks and techniques I can learn.
 
#9
Thanks for another great lesson. I play by shapes in my mind, but instead of dots, I think of numbers for the scale interval. For whatever reason, I find the letter names of notes to be hard to follow while improvising, but the intervals/shapes just seem to match what I hear.

The one thing I would emphasize is to practice moving between shapes on the fretboard. Learning the shapes is a great first step, but if you cannot move between them, your playing will seem rather monotonous.
 
#15
This isn't the first time that the most valuable thing I've come away with from one of Scott's lessons wasn't the thing that the lesson was actually about. Sure, I found the idea of breaking a scale down into a set of shapes very useful, but what the video really drove home for me was that the particular notes you play constitute only one (small?) aspect of playing. When he demonstrates soloing using only four notes, and makes it sound amazing, it's a vivid reminder of the importance of technique, feel, articulation, rhythm, dynamics, and so forth. We could argue about whether Wooten overstates the case when he says that notes -- including scales, melody, and harmony -- represent just one-tenth of what playing is all about, but there's no doubt that many of us spend disproportionately way too much time studying and practicing notes and not enough on all those other things. So I came away form the video motivated to work not on notes and shapes, but on all those other non-note things!
 
#19
I have always viewed the fretboard basically as a piece of graph paper and the various mappings of scales and their harmonized chords as shapes on the grid. It just seemed like the natural thing to do as I was getting more advanced. But it wasn't as though I was told to think like that. I think most players probably think this way.
 
#20

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