Play an F blues entirely below the G string and it sounds pretty good, right up until about chorus five. That’s when I start getting bored, and chances are you do too. Nothing’s wrong with the notes. I’m playing jazz language, I’m playing in time, and the lines are clear and consistent. So what’s making it boring?
I spent a few months analyzing and dissecting several Ray Brown bass lines, and I noticed there’s a formula in them. It’s simple enough that you can plug and play within it to build your own lines. It sorts what you play into two categories: chromatic or intervallic, and below the G string or above it. That’s it, just two.
Chromatic or intervallic: what gives the line its shape
Anything can be an interval, so calling a line “intervallic” sounds a little redundant. Here’s what I mean by it. In an intervallic bass line, the intervals are what give the line its character and its shape. In a chromatic bass line, the chromaticism does that job.
The short version: chromatic is a half step or a whole step. Intervallic is anything greater.
People always ask me what kind of bass lines they should actually play. They know the notes. They know one, three, five, seven and some wrong notes. This is the answer. There are only two: chromatic and intervallic. What you want to get used to isn’t so much the notes themselves as the way each one feels.
The open G splits your register
The second category is register, and the G string is the dividing line. Strictly speaking I mean the open G, because there’s nothing above the G string, as you might have noticed. So you’re either below the open G or above it.
Register matters because of the way people talk. When someone’s speaking, you hear a variety of register. Sometimes they emphasize certain words and the voice gets a little higher. Sometimes they really want to make a point, so they speak lower and softer. If someone talks in the same register the whole time, you start to tune out. When you only play your lines in half position, you actually get bored by your own bass lines, and if you’re bored by your bass lines, everyone else will be too.
Think about Miles’s solo on “So What” from Kind of Blue, considered the quintessential jazz solo. I don’t even remember all of it, but I do know there’s a lot of variety in the registers he’s using. He went from a D to an F before he even got to the bridge. That’s what we need to do in our bass lines.
There’s a misconception that if you stay low and do your job, you’ll keep getting hired. That’s not true. People want variety. A lot of bass players camp out in one spot and end up playing within the same five or six notes without even realizing it.
One thing to watch: a line can straddle the boundary between below and above the open G. It’ll happen, but when you play on that line too much it starts to sound redundant, so avoid it as much as you can.
Put the two categories together and every bar you play is one of four units: chromatic below, chromatic above, intervallic below or intervallic above. You’ve got a type of bass line, and you’ve got a place to play it.
The number one rule: never four of the same
Ray Brown gets called a meat and potatoes bass player, as in he plays the right stuff. That’s so far from the point, and so far from who he was as a bass player.
He was a poet on the bass. His bass lines are like sunflowers. They follow the form perfectly to the extent that they become the form.
Cole Davis
The first thing I noticed in his lines is that he never does four of the same. He’d never play four bars of chromatic below, or four of intervallic above, or four of any of the other units. He always varies the line. Of course, you can’t just play random notes. You still have to play the changes.
Here’s what it sounds like when you break the rule. On a C blues, four straight bars of chromatic below the G string is already boring. That’s what I mean by a monotonous bass line: the same kind of line in the same place for four bars at a time. Bass players do this all the time.
When I demonstrate it, I stay below the G string but play two bars chromatic and two bars intervallic. I didn’t even mean to play what came out. I was just following the formula and thinking, let me play some wider intervals, and instantly it was a beautiful bass line. Alternating chromatic and intervallic every bar works pretty well too.
I used to do this on gigs. I’d force myself to follow the formula and tell myself, okay, Cole, you’re not allowed to play four bars of the same thing. If I’d just played three bars of chromatic below, I had to play an intervallic bar or a bar that went above the G string. It’s also a great way to keep from getting bored yourself.
How Ray Brown opens a line, and how other greats bend the formula
In the lesson I analyze the opening four bars of a Ray Brown line. He starts chromatic above the G string, then goes intervallic, stays intervallic above the G string, and then plays intervallic below the G string. That last move is a different unit, and it instantly gives the line variety. It instantly sounds like a melody.
That’s what great jazz melodies do. Think about Autumn Leaves. There’s so much variety in that melody. It goes from place to place and it answers itself. We know this about our favorite solos and our favorite songs, and then we play a bass line and we’re already bored by it.
You don’t have to split things evenly, either. Paul Chambers played mostly chromatically. Israel Crosby chose to play mostly intervallically. Both work because they’re changing the register, so you can play entirely chromatic or entirely intervallic as long as you change the register. The most important thing is to have variety.
They phrase differently, too. Chambers didn’t really play in perfect two-bar phrases. His playing was more flowy, more stream of consciousness, more about the ebb and flow and the feeling of everything. Crosby was the opposite: very organized, very melodic, with distinct, clear two-bar phrases. Ray Brown plays in two-bar phrases as well, and that leads to the other half of what I took from his lines, cadencing every two bars. That one deserves its own lesson.
A blues drill you can do today
I used to practice six hours a day, and the reason was that I didn’t actually know what I was doing. I had to practice a lot to come up with these solutions. Now I have them, so here’s how to start using this one. Use good notes, one, three, five and seven, with some wrong notes and half steps sprinkled in. If the notes themselves still feel shaky, start with Walking Basslines From the Beginning.
- Hear the problem. Walk four bars of a C blues using only chromatic motion below the open G. Notice how quickly it gets monotonous.
- Split it. Stay below the open G and play two bars chromatic, then two bars intervallic.
- Alternate. Switch between chromatic and intervallic every bar.
- Move the register. Take some of those bars above the open G, and don’t hang around right on the boundary.
- Write it out. Write a bass line on an F blues where you never play four bars of the same unit. If you just did three bars of chromatic below, the next bar has to be intervallic or above the G string.
If you’d like help with the notes for that last step, try the free walking bass line builder. Whatever you end up with, label every bar with its unit before you play it.
Write out that F blues tonight and play it tomorrow. I promise you it’ll be, by default, a great bass line. When you’re ready for a full week of walking work, pick up The 7-Day Walking Bass Breakthrough.
