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Free Jazz Backing Tracks With No Bass: Play-Along for Bassists

Press Play and a piano and a drummer play through the changes of a jazz tune with no bass, so the bass part is all yours. These are free jazz backing tracks with no bass that you set up yourself: pick the tune, the key, the feel and the tempo, anywhere from 40 to 320 bpm. There’s no signup and nothing to install.

The chord you’re on shows up big at the top, with the next one under it, so you can read it from your music stand. Tap Big screen and it fills the whole screen.

Now playing

Next

140 bpm

Set up the band

Feel
Count-in
Swing eighths
Band
Paste your own changes

Put | between bars, like Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | Cmaj7. Two chords in a bar split it: Am7b5 D7b9. Use % to repeat a bar and A: or B: at the start of a line to mark a section.

The changes

Tap a bar to start there.

How to use the play-along

  1. Pick a tune, or open Paste your own changes and type them in with a | between bars, like Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7.
  2. Pick a key and a feel. Every tune moves to all 12 keys, with the chords spelled the way a chart spells them. The feels are swing, bossa, ballad and jazz waltz.
  3. Set the tempo and the count-in. Start slower than you think you need to. The minus and plus buttons move the tempo 4 bpm at a time.
  4. Choose how many choruses, or loop it until you stop it. After the last chorus, the band hits the last chord with you.
  5. Press Play and walk. The bar you’re on lights up in the chart. Tap any bar to start there, which helps when the bridge is the part you need.
  6. Copy the link to send the exact setup (tune, key, feel and tempo) to a student or a bandmate.

Walk a chorus on your own

Turn on Band drops out every other chorus. The band plays a chorus, you play the next one by yourself while the chart keeps moving, and the band comes back in at the top. If you aren’t on bar one when they come back, you’ll hear it.

It’s an exercise Cole Davis gives his students. From his lesson on how bass players should listen to drummers: “One thing that I have all my students do is walk a chorus unaccompanied of any tune and see if it feels good to them. If it doesn’t feel good to you, it won’t feel good to anyone else.”

Know where every bar starts

From Cole’s lesson on learning jazz standards: “Sometimes if a tune is complicated, I’ll actually write out the starting note of each chord.” Pick the first note of every bar, land it on beat one with the band, and fill in the rest once those notes feel easy. The walking bass line builder will write out a full line on the same changes if you want one to compare with yours.

Then play with records

This is a practice band. It plays a tune the same way every time you call it at the same tempo, which makes it good for getting the form and the changes into your hands in every key. Then take them to the real thing: here’s how to play along with jazz records, and when you’re ready to play with people, the Jazz Jam Finder lets you search a city for a jam session.

What the band plays

  • Piano: an electric piano sound playing rootless voicings (the 3rd and 7th with a 9th, 13th or 5th), so it never plays the root in the bass for you. It comps in rhythm, catches some chords early and lays out now and then.
  • Drums: ride cymbal with the hi-hat on 2 and 4 for swing, the same in three for the waltz, cross-stick and hi-hat for bossa, and brushes for ballads. In swing and waltz the drummer sets up the end of every chorus and hits a cymbal at the top of the next one.
  • No bass, ever. Turn off the piano or the drums to play with just one of them, or add a click on 2 and 4.
  • No melodies. The tune list is chord changes only.

All the sound is made in your browser, so nothing downloads and it keeps working without a connection once the page has loaded.

On a phone

Put your phone on the stand and tap Big screen. While the band plays, the page asks your phone to keep the screen on. If the screen locks or you switch apps, the band may stop, so press Play to start it again. Headphones or a small speaker help if the phone’s speaker gets lost under your bass.

Go deeper

Walking Basslines on Upright Bass: From the Beginning

A 5-lesson upright method built on the 1-3-5-7, the walking approach Ron Carter taught Cole at Juilliard.

See the course

For teachers

The play-along is free to use in lessons. Every setup has its own link: pick the tune, key, feel and tempo, press Copy link, and your students open the same band. A link like this one opens Autumn Leaves at 120 bpm.

Keep going

Sources