What Bass Line to Play over Strummed Guitar...

[Odublar]

Or picked for that matter.

My question might be pretty simple...hopefully.

I'm a player of the guitar. I'd like to fill out the rest of my songs with other instruments to polish them. I'm set on the drums end, but not sure about the bass. I bought a budget friendly jazz bass by Fender. I am coordinated enough to thumb around it but not sure if my notes are right. I haven't touched it in about 9 months. I don't really have an ear for tuning so me hearing it will take some time.

However, I need to feel confident that I am playing the right chords over my chord patterns.

In my songs, there is a lot of movement and chord change. I'd like to know if there is a simple program out there that will tell me what note to play when on which chord in a song. If I'm totally missing the point of the bass guitar, please correct me. I've never taken music theory and don't really care to get into that detail because it will probably bore me to death.

I don't know any other players around here and don't really care to compose something with someone else because I like it to sound the way it sounds (Hope that doesn't sound like an a-hole) and usually I don't have the patience to wade through the BS and busy talk that other musicians talk about for hours (it seems) before we get to recording. That is what I am about, recording, and I prefer to mess around with it until I get that sound I hear.

Okay, that last paragraph was probably pointless and I realize people on here are musicians but you might be like me in that sense or not.

Anyways, any tips? (Besides, be nicer. )

[Musicologo]

A bass line is very important to establish the rhythm and the flowing of a song. You don't want to have a dull G-C-G-C bass all the time.

So start thinking this way: put a tonic and a dominant of the chord on strong beats. And make a path in whole steps between them.

Let's exemplify this. Supose you have the chords Dm, G7,C, each one with one 4/4 measure. You can have this bassline:

D---A---/G---D---/C-------. This is the basic struture. You just grabbed the root and the 5th of the chord. Now you can fill in the gaps... think from measure one to measure two, you go from A to G... what's the best way to join them? Well, put a Ab between them. The same for following chord.

D---A-- Ab/G---D -Db-/C-------.

Now you can apply the same reasoning to the notes in between...

D- EF G A -- Ab/G - F E D -Db-/C--------.

Just notice I've just completed the gaps with notes following each other. This is a very simple way to do that. Notice also I put some rhythm. If every - is an 8th note, then you have

4D, 16E, 16F, 8G, 4A., 16Ab/4G, 8F, 8E, 4D, 4Db/1C

[Odublar]

Sweet dude, thanks for keeping is simple.

Do you have any links that easily point out the tonic and dominants of each chord? I don't know anything about notes in between. Anything really simple to look at is best.

Thanks again for the short little tutorial.

[robogone]

I'd say work on your musical ear. Listen to other pieces of music that seem to have similar chord changes and pick out bass parts that you like. If you learn various riffs and fills, you soon start noticing that you can play variations on these and it becomes pretty easy to follow the guitar and make the bass interesting.

Lots of practice basically.

[Odublar]

Common sense always helps right?

I'm going to use the template above to probably just mess around with the already recorded guitar parts and listen until it sounds right to me.

Have a good night!