Building Walking Bass Lines Jazz and Blues Bass Instruction Book | Online Audio Included | Hal Leonard Bass Builders Series

by Ed Friedland

A walking bass line is the most common approach to jazz bass playing, but it is also used in rock music, blues, rockabilly, RandB, gospel, Latin, country and many other types of music. The term 'walking' is used to describe the moving feeling that quarter notes create in the bass part. The specific goal of this book is to familiarize players with the techniques used to build walking bass lines and to make them aware of how the process works. Through the use of 90-minutes' worth of recorded rhythm tracks, players will have the opportunity to put the new learning directly into action. This book literally gives bassists the tools they need to build their own walking bass lines.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Reference

64 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only book that started with playing one note and went all the way through to playing complex basslines without losing me.

[David Hedden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed provides a step-wise, logical approach to getting started on construction of walking bass lines from song chord charts. This is not an end all lesson book but provides an excellent starting point.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard not to love a walking bass line, but if you look for how to write and perform a good walking bass line online you're mostly going to find "hacks and formulas," which suffer by telling you to write uninteresting, repetitive lines and taking away from the fun of developing your own lines. This book doesn't give you formulas but instead demonstrates the way that notes flow from one to another, a skill that not only frees you up to write your own walking bass lines but has a ton of application in building interesting chord progressions, and in writing bass lines that aren't "walking" jazz bass. For a very arrogant guy like myself who believes himself to be real good at writing bass parts, this book showed me how much I still had to learn and helped me get started.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friedland has put together an accessible path to playing more fun and interesting walking bass lines. Bite-size nuggets of theory are introduced as you go. Choose your own adventure exercises based only on chord markings are brought in early.

[Stretto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valuable book for starting out learning walking bass