Should I feel guilty?

[Hellzero]

Please don't forget that jazz music is before all street music with simple harmony.

It's then have been appropriated by snob musicians turning it into an intellectual music with complex harmony.

Choose your side. 😀

[Hellzero]

I've been watching the 26 minutes introduction video. Top notch lesson with a cleverer approach than the usual way. And Mark J Smith is going straight to the point and not jumping around and talking nonsense for hours.

Thanks for sharing this @lownote12 😊

 

[lownote]

1 hour ago, Hellzero said:

Please don't forget that jazz music is before all street music with simple harmony.

It's then have been appropriated by snob musicians turning it into an intellectual music with complex harmony.

Choose your side. 😀

You've visited Norwich Jazz Club then

[odysseus]

7 hours ago, DanOwens said:

dissonant microtonal chromaticism

Sounds like a King Gizzard album.... 😄

[Ricky 4000]

4 hours ago, Hellzero said:

I've been watching the 26 minutes introduction video. Top notch lesson with a cleverer approach than the usual way. And Mark J Smith is going straight to the point and not jumping around and talking nonsense for hours.

Thanks for sharing this @lownote12 😊

 

I like the sound of the passing notes best, so I'd just play those, personally. 🤗

[tinyd]

I think the most important thing with walking is to set things up so that you 'land' correctly on the first beat of the next chord - in my experience, getting this right is probably the most important because if you don't, it can throw the rest of the band because it obscures the chord changes.

The bass playing on this shred video is a great example of 'wrong' walking - it's really well done and it sounds like the bass player knew exactly what they were doing:
 

 

 

Edited October 25, 2019 by tinyd

[RossHetherington]

I always have taken the Bootsy Collins approach to heart the power of one. As long as you hit the root at the right moment you can do what the heck you like in between. Fight the system. Failing that just play in Am it gives you access to basically everything.

[Hellzero]

12 hours ago, tinyd said:

I think the most important thing with walking is to set things up so that you 'land' correctly on the first beat of the next chord - in my experience, getting this right is probably the most important because if you don't, it can throw the rest of the band because it obscures the chord changes.

The bass playing on this shred video is a great example of 'wrong' walking - it's really well done and it sounds like the bass player knew exactly what they were doing:
 

 

 

This Shred is a joke in fact, the bass is right, "John Coltrane and Miles Davis" are completely out of the key. This is a re-recorded kind of tribute to these two giant players made by jazz students, trying to show how out these two could be able to play. It looks like the guys behind this tried to do a dual key Coltrane king of thing. So nothing wrong with the bass, here, which is always in the right harmony for So what?

It's a 2010 re-recorded footage. 😉

[tinyd]

11 hours ago, Hellzero said:

This Shred is a joke in fact, the bass is right,

So nothing wrong with the bass, here, which is always in the right harmony for So what?

It's a 2010 re-recorded footage. 😉

I know it's a joke, that's why I posted it 😀

The bass is "wrong", just not as obviously wrong as the horns. The bassline has a lot of subtle errors that are exactly the kind made by players who are either learning or faking it (myself included)

[mcnach]

On 24/10/2019 at 06:56, lownote12 said:

I am engrossed in Mark Smith's Walking Bass course. It is is very deep and complicated for a simple person.  All 62 videos of it.

But then I started to notice something reassuring.  You can actually play almost anything and get away with it.

Let me explain...

You set out to join the dots between chords tones. There are four of those. Your bass line gets smoother as you introduce scale notes, and there are lots more of those. It gets smoother still as you introduce chromatics, and that's almost everything else.

That's when I realised...

It doesn't matter what note you play.

So now I happily play faux-walking bass, concentrating only on hitting the beat and leaping up and down the fretboard in a confident looking manner, playing largely random notes.  

Looks good,  sounds good (helps to play fretless with dull flats).  No effort to learn. And I recently played just like that in a jazz group for an evening just to prove my theory.  I was complimented.... 

So am I bad? 

 

 

I can't play a decent walking bassline on the spot to save my life. I need to sit down, and work it out, slowly, then play it and only then I can get a bit loose and add nice things to it.

It's something I want to get better at. I have the Ed Friedland book but I haven't yet used it...

So, when a few months ago, our guitarist/singer comes in with a new song he's written and says "oh, I've got this, we could add it to the songs we'll record next week, a walking bassline here would go great". 

So I used lots of chromatic notes and, like you, I played with confidence and making sure the rhythm was good. It didn't matter that everytime I played the line it was a bit different... I got away with it and they liked it. But I was crying nervously inside. I really need to work at this. It's not that hard, I'm just too slow to do it smoothly on the spot... I guess it means -shudder- practice!

 

[mcnach]

On 24/10/2019 at 08:50, Hellzero said:

When asked, say you were playing in a modal way. This will end the conversation and you'll be considered a true genius.

Almost nobody will ever try to argue as modal playing is a total mystery to most of the musicians.

And if it doesn't seem to work, there still is the "you know free jazz is quite hard to explain" sentence.

Or use the George Benson technique, repeat your mistakes as they will then become an integral part of the way the notes were chosen. Not a mistake anymore, but a very deeply thought approach.

Isn't life beautiful ? 😁

 

That's so true!

It's like what Victor Wooten said: you're only half a step away from a 'correct' note. 

With that in mind, if I realise I play something wrong, I slide up or down to a better sounding note and then REPEAT it... and it looks like you meant it. I swear, it works, I remember once getting a compliment about that odd but cool sounding riff I came up with

God, I'm such a fraud.

[Stub Mandrel]

Saturday I had to remember/improvise a walking line I made up to a song I only heard/played twice before and a week ago...

Luckily (a) it was pretty simple and (b) the singer did a long explanatory introduction so I just started playing a very simple line very quietly, gradually getting more complicated and louder, uke (!) (who wrote it) and drummer (who had never heard it before) joined in and we were rolling along when the singer came in and it felt like something we'd honed for weeks 🙂

[Guest]

Taking the approach that playing any old notes fits is not far off Les Dawson territory

it doesn’t have to be top-class players that can spot a faker - even a reasonably proficient player is going to expect to hear something idiomatically correct.

A faker may have good time and may even hit the odd root note, but, assuming they can be heard well enough (not always guaranteed with an upright bass), there will undoubtedly be lots of very dissonant notes and no structure behind them to make the line work - plus if the faker doesn’t know the song they probably won’t know the (often written, or accepted based on a classic version of the tune) line that goes under the head or any rhythmic hits, trading fours/eights etc.

A player who has put a bit more work into learning walking lines will play the root of the chord on the downbeat and either chord tones or scale tones with the odd chromatic passing note.
Better players improve upon this by playing a line that makes sense in of itself - it outlines the harmony so all the other players know where they are (bass is a supporting instrument) but adds something to the music. Walking bass can be learned entirely by ear so it’s not snobbish, you don’t actually have to know all the ins and outs of harmony, but you do need to know what shapes work through chord changes (and what those changes sound like). 
 

It also depends on the style - an intimate ballad will probably require long root notes, a fast bebop number may require just scale/chord tones (no time to think!)

What’s not been mentioned is a strong knowledge and background in the roots of jazz - blues, ragtime etc. There are many standards built on a blues and the bass parts closely reference blues bass lines. Without this a walking line just becomes a clever threading through chord changes rather than music with meaning in its own right.

Whilst you can just walk chromatically it quickly becomes tiring on the ear as there is no sense of the overlying harmony and more importantly, no tension and release. If the changes are Am - D7 - Gmaj7 and you play Bb - Eb -Ab all the way through on the bass you won’t be getting called back

Look on the positive side - learning to play walking lines well is immensely rewarding and there are few more creative experiences on bass.