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    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes
    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes
    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes
    Ebook166 pages1 hour

    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes

    By Stuart Clayton

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    About this ebook

    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes is a complete reference manual featuring all of the scales, modes and arpeggios used by the modern bass guitarist. The construction of each scale and mode is covered in detail and the reader is encouraged to learn the content of the scale rather than the prescribed fretboard patterns found in other books. 'Real world' bass grooves clearly demonstrate the sound and use of each scale. Audio files for these exercises are available as a free download from the publishers website. This book is for bass players of all levels.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStuart Clayton
    Release dateJul 13, 2011
    ISBN9780956964601
    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes
    Author

    Stuart Clayton

    Stuart Clayton has been a professional musician and writer for over ten years. He has worked as a staff writer for Bass Guitar Magazine since its first issue, written seven bass instruction books for Sanctuary Publishing, including 100 Tips For Bass Guitar You Should Have Been Told, Crash Course: Bass, Bass Xtreme, Basic Bass Workout and Giants Of Bass and toured the world with Carl Palmer. He now runs his own company, Bassline Publishing, which publishes transcription books for legendary bassists such as Mark King, Stuart Hamm, Bernard Edwards and John Entwistle, as well as an acclaimed range of tuition books such as Ultimate Slap Bass and Solo Arrangements for Electric Bass. He is also Head of Bass at the British Institute of Modern Music (Bristol) and is an artist endorsee for Zon basses and Aguilar amplification.

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    • 4/5
      Very informative! I’ve been playing bass for almost ten years now and I was looking for something that condensed the material and theory for scales and modes for a quick brush up. This book does just that! I was able to go through it pretty easily due to being in the game for a while now. It would have definitely been much harder to go through the book without a proper understanding of fundamental theory in harmony.
    • 5/5
      Very simple and effective for beginners! Loved the presentation entirely!

    Book preview

    The Bass Player's Guide to Scales & Modes - Stuart Clayton

    The Bass Player`s Guide to Scales & Modes

    A Step-by-Step Approach to Mastering the Fretboard

    By Stuart Clayton

    Published by Bassline Publishing at Smashwords

    Copyright 2011 Stuart Clayton

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Introduction

    An understanding of scales, modes and arpeggios is crucial to anyone with aspirations to work as a professional musician. As a bass player, a thorough understanding of this material will enable you to play comfortably in any given key and transfer licks and ideas easily from one key to another. It will also open up the fretboard and allow you to easily navigate the whole range of the instrument. Whether playing basslines, fills or soloing over chord changes, a solid knowledge of the appropriate scales, modes and arpeggios will enable you to understand what you are playing, and will fuel your creativity.

    As someone who has been teaching both privately and within an educational institution for many years, I have observed the difficulty with which some of my students get to grips with scales and modes. These essential tools are often perceived as complex, boring and a barrier to creativity, although those who have taken the time to study them will tell you that the opposite is true: an understanding of scales, modes and arpeggios will allow you to communicate ideas more effectively with other musicians and will enable a far clearer understanding of how musical ideas can be developed. In short, it will enhance your creativity. I believe the problem lies in the manner in which these concepts are taught. Many teachers and schools demonstrate scales and modes as a series of fretboard patterns or box shapes that are to be memorised and transferred around the fretboard. Could there be a more unmusical way to learn music? Surely an understanding of the actual musical content behind these ideas would be more beneficial? After all, if you consider the sheer number of patterns that would need to be memorised in order to master all of this material, then the task seems next to impossible - little wonder then that many consider learning their scales a boring and fruitless pursuit.

    This book has been written to illustrate what I consider to be a more thorough and musical way of learning scales, modes and arpeggios - one that does not rely on the memorisation of a large number of fretboard patterns. The basic idea behind the book is simple - to understand the content of the scale rather than learn a pattern. This is how I was taught, and it is a method that I have used in my own teaching now for several years - with considerable success.

    The material in this book is designed to be cumulative - that is, you should not move on to the next chapter until you have mastered the previous one. In fact, even if you feel that you already have a good grasp of the basics, I still recommend reading from the beginning anyway - after all, a recap on these essential musical concepts will never hurt anyone. Remember that there are no shortcuts to learning this material in a musical way.

    You should also be aware that this book is intended to be a complete guide to scales, modes and arpeggios. Depending on what kind of musician you are, there may be some scales, modes or concepts that you will rarely have a use for. As an example, the modes of the melodic minor scale will probably not have a great deal of use to those of you who do not play jazz. So whilst I feel that it would be beneficial for all bass players to study this material in its entirety, you may find that some of the later chapters are surplus to your own requirements.

    Here are some final points that you should be aware of before getting started on the book:

    Music Theory

    This book is quite complex in places and assumes that you have a basic grounding in music theory. If not, it would be good to familiarize yourself with the fundamentals before going any further. I recommend studying the different kinds of intervals and learning how they are named, and playing them on the bass or piano in order to hear how they sound. You would also benefit from learning where the notes are placed on the musical stave, and studying the basics of how rhythm is notated.

    Fingering

    With many of the scale examples, I have included a recommended left hand fingering guide beneath the notation stave. This guide follows a sensible `finger-per-fret` system that will enable you to learn to use all four fingers on the left hand more effectively. Position shifts are indicated with an arrow. Try to follow this guide if you can. Alternatively, you can come up with your own fingerings, but try to avoid over-using any one finger, and be sure to keep fingers available in the direction of travel. This means that if you are ascending one string, don`t just slide the fourth finger along since this makes your first, second and third fingers completely redundant. If you follow sensible fingerings when practicing this material, they will gradually translate into good fingerings in the rest of your playing. This also means that your scales and modes will also make for excellent warm-up exercises.

    Fretboard Knowledge

    This book is written on the assumption that you know where the notes are on the fingerboard. As you`ll soon find when you begin working through the book, being able to work them out by counting up from another note is not good enough - you need fast, independent knowledge of each note on the neck. There are many resources on the Internet for helping you learn the fingerboard, but I would also recommend finding a good teacher who can help/test you with these.

    Tempos

    There are no tempos written for anything other than the `real world` bass grooves that you`ll find in some of the chapters. Learning scales takes time, and the last thing I want you to do is to pit yourself against a metronome before you have fully internalised the information. Do not feel that you need to practice your scales, modes or arpeggios with a metronome - you don`t.

    Notation or TAB?

    You`ll see that I have included TAB as well as standard notation. Whilst I would prefer not to include TAB in a book such

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