Parker's Mood Bass Line

Sticking with my jazz blues studies this month I've transcribed the bass line under Bird's solo on the great tune, 'Parker's Mood'. There's a lot that I've learnt from looking at this bass line, most importantly the simplicity of a good bass line!

The first thing that I noticed about this line is that out of the 24 bars (2 full choruses of 12 bars) 22 of these bars start on the root note

Lick Of The Month #5

Hey everyone! This month's lick is another walking bass lick and is one I've pulled out of my transcription for the bass line on Charlie Parker's 'Now's The Time' available here!

Below is the video for the full transcription but you can hear this month's lick at 10 seconds and again at 32 seconds.

First Stadium Gig!

A bit of a departure from jazz theory for today's post... Just to let everyone know I've just played my first stadium yippeee!!!!

The Dave Liebman Approach

I recently found Dave Liebman's website which has got a great article on how to get the most from the transcription process. It goes into great detail on how to really get into a solo once you've transcribed it. 

I've applied this approach to a Hank Jones lick, rather than a whole solo. The sheet music for these examples are below although I highly recommend doing this whole process yourself and just use anything from this post or from Dave's site as a starting point as the real benefit comes from when you've put the hours in yourself.

Lick Of The Month #4

September's Lick Of The Month is one of Cannonball Adderley's from Freddie Freeloader. I chose this lick as I love the way he approaches the change from the last Ab7 of the tune back to the first Bb7. Here's the lick, skip to 7:25 to hear it.

How To Build A Pedal Board For Less Than £30!

Double Thumbing Dojo

A student of mine recently asked for some help with double thumbing and as this is a pretty major point of interest across bassists I thought I'd post my lesson up here! This isn't an area I've spent a lot of time working on but I've gotten the foundations down pretty well.

If you're new to double thumbing then I'd say start here with these basic exercises which are designed to make sure you've got the basic technique down. Practice these as slowly as you can bare and if you're not getting a good clean tone on the down AND the up stroke then stick with it before you move onto anything quicker.

Double Thumb Exercise 1

Double Thumb Exercise 2

The two grooves I've written are based around constant 16th note patterns which need you to keep your thumb going while using your left hand to mute the beats being played as dead notes.

Tab and notation for the bass grooves.