Beginner Guitar Lesson 32 - Riffing the Bass Line

In many cases, riffing or doubling the bass line in the blues sounds really cool and is an effective way to create very tight backing for a soloist, like a lead guitar, harmonica or keyboard. As a guitarist, though, you are not just limited to playing single notes. You can also play little chord stabs in between the notes of the bass riff to help pad it out.

In this exercise we’re going to learn a standard bass pattern for the blues. This particular pattern is moveable, which means, for instance, you can move the same pattern to any root note to get the bass line for any chord. The pattern consists of the root note, octave, flat 7th, 4th and 5th of any given chord.

We’re going to start from E7, so our pattern is going to look like this: it is in 6/8 time as illustrated by the green numbers, and the red letters denote the octave. There is an example for each chord in the blues sequence.

E    E E     E D   D A B D

1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

 

A    A A   A  G  G D E G

1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

 

B    B B    B  A   A E F#A

1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6
 

When playing this riff, you can opt to use a plectrum or you can play finger style. In the example, (camtasia link here) the guitarist is playing finger style. It is important to note that each note is short and damped a bit for effect. You can damp the notes by palm muting with your picking hand. To accomplish this technique, you simply let the palm of your hand gently rest on the strings next to the bridge while picking.

Practice each chord's bass line individually to start with, the usual way: start slow at about 120 bpm 6/8 time, and work it up to about 150 bpm in 5 bpm increments. After you get used to that, try throwing the chord in between notes like you can hear and see in the accompanying video (camtasia link here).

The chord is being played on the 2nd beat of every bar in the 6/8 pattern, and it is only voiced for a very short amount of time as the riff carries on. In the video, the guitarist uses the blues turnaround that we’ve already become familiar with.

Take this new skill and pracice hard. Start adding some of your own ideas into the mix, and remember that you have a number of techniques and concepts to choose from now. Hammer ons, pull offs, moving chords, comping, and finger style - you can use them all at will! So, mix it up and have some fun!

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