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Issue No.5
Last updated on 4 May, 2023
To become a competant musician there is a lot of rote learning for things like scales, arpeggios, chords and musical notation etc. etc.
This can feel rather daunting to the beginner - as all they tend to want to do is play some tunes like their musical heroes and leave the learning bit back in high school. The problem with only learning songs written by others is that very quickly you become a sort of musical impersonator - who has temporarily taken on part of the musical personality of the famous player - but have no musical personality of your own. What is required is a method of learning all the boring stuff without the feeling that the fun has been taken out of the reason for picking up your instrument in the first place. With these aims in mind a series of exercises are presented below that are musical, fun to play and move you one step closer to having your own musical personality.
The perfect scale to start improvising (making-up) your own bass lines are the major and minor pentatonics as they contain the ideal notes to play over major and minor chords respectively.
The exercises that follow will demonstrate the 4E2 octave box-shape for major pentatonics followed by the 4Em2 octave box-shape for minor pentatonics.
Click on the appropriate bullet point to move to each box shape in detail
MAJOR TONALITY
MINOR TONALITY
4E2 octave shape
Em sound
Am sound
Bm sound
The twelve bar blues in the key of E minor will now be used to join together the three locations of the minor pentatonic box shapes for a musical result.
F sound
Bb sound
C sound
The twelve bar blues in the key of F majorwill now be used to join together the three locations of the major pentatonic box shapes for a musical result.
