HONE YOUR SKILLS: DIG DEEPER WITH YOUR BASS THINKING

Last month we looked at inversions, which are chords where the lowest note is something other than the root. Using the third, the fifth, or even the seventh in the bass—in other words, the lowest note in the chord— offers us a whole lot more interesting options as bass players.

- STEVE LAWSON

Developing an ear for, and a facility with, those shapes will also make us far more useful in a band, enabling us to contribute arrangement and composition ideas that will enhance the music we make together.

This month, we’re going to take a slightly different route to extending these ideas. It’s one that bypasses a huge amount of theory and might seem, for that reason, to be overlooking a ton of rules and stylistic conventions about how and why chords work in the way they do. But as this is a beginner column, I really want to inspire you with the permission to experiment before you’ve gathered all the technical know-how. Let’s unpack that idea a little more.

There are two main kinds of research— theoretical and experiential. Theoretical research involves reading books, discovering what other people have done or said within a particular field, compiling a body of evidence about whatever it is we’re trying to discover, and then—and only then—applying that research to practice. In many areas of human endeavor, this is vital. If you’re practicing medicine or building an aeroplane, ‘trying things out to see what works’ can have some pretty catastrophic effects if you get it wrong.