The Major's Bass Boot Camp (Session 3)

[Major-Minor]

The Major's Bass Boot Camp (Session3)

Flat 5s in Dominant 7 and Minor 7 Chords

To be honest, you are unlikely to find many examples of these flat 5s (♭5 ) in today's popular music tracks. There is the occasional usage in the more jazzy sounding Hip Hop and R'nB songs, but its probably only because the producer has discovered a jazzy sample that he has shoehorned into his song, rather than with any real understanding or knowledge of this harmonic devise.

However, the worlds of Jazz and Latin have flat 5s in abundance, and they are common in many Classical music periods, particularly early 20th Century composers like Delius, Debussy, Ravel etc.

Print out this pdf:
[attachment=38965:MBBC3.pdf]
And listen to this mp3:
[attachment=38966:Output_1_2.mp3]

So what is a flat 5 ?
Well, it is exactly as the name suggests - the 5th of the chord is flattened !
For the purposes of this session, we are talking about 4 note chords ie root, 3rd, 5th, 7th.

In the written example, the first chord is Em7b5:
Root is E
3rd (minor) is G (if it was E major it would be G#)
5th (flattened) is Bb (in a straight Eminor triad, the 5th would be
7th is D (remember the key signature of Eminor is 1 sharp - the same as its relative major G, so the 7th note of the Natural minor scale is D natural - not D# which only occurs in the Harmonic and Melodic minor scales)

The sound of a minor 7th chord is a lovely rich, stable harmony. By flattening the 5th, it changes to something less stable - it wants to move to another harmony - it is still rich sounding but has a restless quality.

Similarly with the next chord - A7b5 - we get a desire to move on, to try to resolve.
A7 is a Dominant chord, by nature unstable (due to the tritone from major 3rd to dom 7th ), but by flattening the 5th we accentuate that instability, and create even more tension.

This is a good point at which to introduce the Ⅱ 7 - Ⅴ 7 - Ⅰ sequence which is central to the Jazz and Latin genres.

The 2 chords above - Em7b5 and A7b5 - are Ⅱ and Ⅴ in the key of D (or D minor) ie the 2nd note of the D scale is E, and the 5th note is A. (Roman Numerals are used to represent the chords built on the degrees of the scale).

But a great little devise is to convert the chord Ⅰ (D minor chord in this instance) into a chord Ⅱ (so Dminor is now the Ⅱ chord of C minor OR could be major) and then that chord Ⅰ (Cminor in this instance) in turn becomes chord Ⅱ in Bb.
You can keep on going in this manner ad libitum, but for the purposes of this session I have chosen to "land" on Bb (so I have nominally put this sequence in the key of Bb).

Example 2 is the same as Example 1 but one octave higher (notice the 8va sign and bracket), and I've only written the first bar so you can choose how far down the fretboard you wish to go, just repeating the fingering pattern.

The first Example demonstrates my own method of fingering:
The 1st 8 semiquavers are all in one position (5th - where the 1st finger is at the 5th fret), using the one finger per fret guitar method. The following 24 notes use the DB method (1-2-4), which requires more position changing but ensures the hand is not strained by over stretching. If you've not used this method before, have a go, slowly at first, gradually increasing speed. I'm sure you will see that it is much easier on the hand in a quick passage like this.

But when you try Example 2, which is the same sequence but an octave higher, please use the one finger per fret method. This works fine up here where the frets are closer together.

Double bass players:
Use the fingering system of the second lot of semiquavers from word go:
ie E (4th finger on A string) G (1st) shift up to Bb (4th) D (2nd) shift down to C# (2nd) A (4th) G (1st) Eb (2nd) shift down to D (4th) and now use the written fingering.

Any questions ?