Learning to Play Walking Bass Lines for /r/bass

Learning to Play Walking Bass Lines for /r/bass

One of the questions that comes up most often on https://reddit.com/r/bass is some variation on how do I
learn to play walking bass lines?. I have responded dozens of different times to the question and finally
decided to combine pieces of those answers into one document that I could link to.

Before I start, I want to make one thing straight. Although I am a good jazz bassist, I am not a great jazz
bassist. Chances are that if you’re reading this, you aren’t going to be a great jazz bassist either, but that
shouldn’t stop you from aspiring to be a good jazz bassist.

I am also a lousy music theoretician. I know enough to get by, but I am absolutely not an authority.
However, assuming that you’re a person who can’t play walking bass but would like to, I hope that my
confession will encourage you to believe that a lack of classroom music theory knowledge is not an
obstacle on the path to walking well. Everybody is different, and there’s a chance I may just be a weird
fluke, but I’ve read too many biographies about really killer jazz players who worked entirely from intuition
to believe that an academic knowledge of harmony is a prerequisite for being able to play jazz bass.

That absolutely does not mean that I think theory is for geeks and you shouldn’t bother learning it; I’m just
saying that the theory that I do know was mostly acquired on the job after I could already walk well enough
to land some gigs

When you spend a lot of time in rehearsals or lessons with players who have been at it for a while, there’s
always a lot of discussion. Maybe it’s about how some chord is functioning, or why some chord seems
weird but isn’t. You wind up accumulating a bunch of useful knowledge even if you’re not a music scholar.

Nobody is going to mistake me for Christian McBride, but I don’t feel any fear of walking now, although I
was once terrified.

Getting Started

For readers who like to get down to brass tacks right away and want me to tell you the one simple trick that
will make this all work, stay with me. We will get to that but there is some other stuff first that is way more
important, and we need to go through all that before we pick up an instrument.

Before I go on, I want to make sure that credit is given where it’s due. The ideas that I describe here are
not great insights that I discovered myself. I am simply paraphrasing hundreds of different lessons that I
was lucky enough to have received from great bassists and jazz educators that I studied with. People who
know me– especially people who know me because we shared a teacher –will see that I have stolen
ruthlessly from them, which is what I think they wanted. I don’t want any credit, and if you want to know
who my teachers were I’ll happily tell you.

Music and music education are never free from controversy and there will be teachers who disagree
vehemently with the advice I give here. That’s cool. In reality, people learn music in different ways, and the
student shoulders much of the burden of figuring out what isn’t working for them and finding an alternative.
If what I describe here gives you results: great. If it doesn’t, then it’s important that you seek out advice that
is better for you, but I would caution you to take any advice that there’s only one way to learn to do this with
a grain of salt.

Before I start talking about actually playing this music, I want to talk about how people learn other kinds of
things, which are like jazz but don’t involve an instrument.
An Allegory of Jazz as a Story

Being a jazz musician is a lot like being a comedian. Each comic is different, but most of those who want to
perform for people will try to land gigs at comedy clubs. They do this by putting together a set of material.

You can think of a set as a rough script which includes a bunch of jokes a comic is going to deliver from the
stage, generally measured by their length in minutes. Clubs usually give aspiring comics sets that are five
or ten minutes long in advance of a much longer spot that will be given to a main act. Performers who
aren’t yet main act material work up these short sets so they can be ready when a spot opens.

A comic doesn't perform their set exactly the same way every night, even if it's only five minutes long. They
take a joke out one night, the next night maybe they put it back in. Some nights an unexpected thing
happens and they just improvise a new joke on the spot. Some nights the first joke in a series bombs so
they try something else.

Regardless of how the set goes, a comic wants to end it on an upbeat. Since their time is short, they need
to make sure that if they go off in an unplanned direction, they get back to the jokes they plan to end with,
lest they don’t run out of time. So there’s a plan, even if it isn’t a very strict one.

To people who don’t do comedy, the fact that the act is planned might not be obvious. Audiences might just
believe that this funny person walked up onto the stage and started thinking of jokes. This is a big part of
why people love comedy; the delivery seems so casual and relaxed that it is almost impossible to believe
that someone could be so funny. Although some comedians are experienced enough that they really could
just improvise an hour long set with some good stuff they just came up with on the spot, if you’ve ever seen
the same comedian twice, you know that they are drawing from a pool of stuff that has killed on other
nights. It’s not a completely spontaneous performance, but part of what makes comedy so special is how
spontaneity can be folded into a show.

Jazz is similar. If you go see the early set of a killing trio in Philadelphia on a Friday night, and you see
them again Saturday in Newark, you’re going to see two totally different shows. But you are also going to
recognize a lot of the stuff you heard the night before, including parts of improvised solos. This doesn’t
mean that jazz artists are phoning it in, doing the equivalent of lip-syncing, having memorized something
and then pretending that it was improvised. It just means that improvisation, at its core, is really about
taking an idea and then exploring it again and again trying to make it better every time. The mood of the
audience, or the feel of the room, or the weather or anything often propels a soloist to play more or less of
something.

Many young bassists who aspire to be improvisers mistakenly believe that being able to improvise means
that they will be able to spontaneously create a really compelling walking line out of thin air. Almost
always, they believe that the key to this is music theory, a broad family of knowledge that includes rhythm,
harmony, and various pedagogical elements of music. They imagine that once having acquired this sacred
knowledge that sick walking lines will emerge from their fingers, as if they had read a spell tome and could
then shoot lightning from their fingers.

That’s not how it works.

If you want to be a comedian, you need to know a lot of jokes, most of which aren’t yours. If you want to be
a jazz bassist, I think you get the picture.

Theory and Language

Music Theory, as a subject, is a great deal like English as a subject. In primary English courses we learn
about parts of speech; nouns and verbs and pronouns. We distinguish subjects from objects, and present
from past participles. We diagram sentences. In short, we analyze written English.

If you select two native English speakers, one with a Ph.D in English, and the other a professional
comedian, they won’t have any trouble understanding each other. What’s more, the professor will probably
have no trouble making the comedian laugh, and the comedian will probably impress the professor with his
command of language.

It’s rare to find an English professor who hasn’t published works of some type, whether it be poetry, prose,
or research. Both the professor and the comedian are able to use language as a vehicle for connecting
with audiences, even though the professor might have a deeper technical knowledge of language.

It is much the same with painters who frequently don’t know the chemistry of paints, or race car drivers who
have no interest in how engines are built. There are always exceptions, but we can say with certainty that
it’s not necessary to have a deep theoretical understanding of language in order to be able to make an
audience laugh using that language.

I have committed this entire document up to this point on this topic because I want you, an aspiring jazz
bassist, to think about how you would learn to become a comedian, if that were your goal instead of being
a jazz bassist. Certainly some aspiring comedians began as college English majors, but it is an absolute
certainty that you can make huge audiences laugh uncontrollably with no academic training in English, and
to trust that the technical knowledge will come as a result. Music theory is awesome, but your knowledge or
lack of it is not what your ability to play walking bass hinges on.

Getting Started

Most people who enjoy telling jokes did not wait to try to tell one until they had invented a joke of their own.
They heard somebody else tell a joke first. They noticed that it made people laugh. Then they told other
people the same joke to see if they would laugh. Often they couldn’t remember the joke word for word, but
remembered the delivery, and they tried to approximate that.

Playing jazz is not the same as telling jokes but they are similar in that jazz performers almost always play
for audiences who want something recognizable to them as jazz. They don’t want to hear it the same way
night after night, but there are structures that they are anticipating and might be disappointing if they don’t
find them in a performance. In other words, while there aren’t any formal rules between jazz audiences and
performers, there are expectations.

As an example, jazz audiences expect to hear walking bass in tunes that call for it. They can tell you when
they think they are hearing a good bassist walking well, even if they couldn’t analyze what they were
hearing. They also love novelty. For example, it is a treat as a jazz fan to hear an arrangement of a familiar
song played in a way they have never heard before or even expected, or to hear a player quote a few bars
of a familiar melody in a solo.

If you are new to jazz, you will likely not have developed these expectations. Imagine that you were an
adult who somehow avoided ever seeing standup comedy and a friend took you to see some legendary
comedian. There might be a few jokes that you don’t get, but it’s pretty likely that you’re going to laugh a
lot.

You might even decide that the experience was so profoundly enjoyable that you want to be a comedian
too, but the only jokes you know are the ones you heard at the show. You can only repeat those so many
times before people start to get bored, but maybe when you try to think of your own jokes you struggle to
write something that is funny to audiences but not plagiarized.
The obvious solution might be to search for a book on how to be funny, and to be sure, such books exist.
However, I think if you surveyed a hundred popular comedians and asked them whether they learned to be
funny by reading a book, the number would be vanishingly small.

If you asked the same panel of comedians how they had learned to be funny, my bet is that they would tell
you that they memorized and repeated the jokes that they loved to hear, probably from the time they were
really young. I also think they would tell you that, as their interest in comedy increased, they discovered
some comedians whose work they preferred to almost anyone else’s, and that they listened to everything
they could find from that influence. Often, as they discovered the influences of their influences, they’d tell
you that they began to consume those performer’s material as well. Then they’d tell you about how they
stumbled upon new up-and-comers, and so on.

I think they’d tell you that they noticed that any comedian who was really good didn’t sound too much like
anybody else, but that they also kind of conformed to a model of comedy, with a structure.

That structure can be analyzed, and a masterful comedian will be able to explain to you how one of their
influences used language in some particular way, or how they used timing in a way that made them stand
out. Comedy Theory, if you will.

The important detail here is that this comedy theory didn’t, in most cases ,need to be discovered before the
comedian could tell a joke. Rather, it emerged, becoming known to the comedian as a result of being
immersed in comedy for perhaps decades. It is knowledge that represents experience, which was acquired
as a result of loving a style of performance so much that they would devote a major part of their life to it.

Just as with comedy, the most fundamental prerequisite for learning to play jazz is loving to listen to jazz.
We must be frank with ourselves about our motivations. It’s easy, especially if you’re a young person, to
see somebody like Christian McBride play for an audience who is going wild and think, man I want what
that guy has got, and set about trying to figure out the technical details of how he plays.

A performance by one of Christian’s groups is like an iceberg floating in the arctic ocean. Although the part
you can see is amazing and beautiful, it is supported by a massive, invisible bulk of experience, built up by
decades of listening, memorization, and analysis by all the players in the ensemble. All that started with
loving jazz.

It’s absolutely possible to learn to love jazz at the same time you are learning to play it. I started to play in
jazz orchestras when I was ten or so, knew nothing about the style and only loved rock music, but loved
playing with people and it didn’t matter what style. I learned a tremendous amount about music in general
in those primary school ensembles, and could read written walking lines or play generic arpeggios, but I
couldn’t really walk until much later when the music got the hooks in me and I had spent thousands of
hours listening and transcribing it.

If your goal is to play jazz for audiences with groups of other jazz players, you’re going to be in a very
similar position to the standup comedian. It isn’t enough to write jokes that make you laugh, other people
need to think they’re funny too. The context of the jokes matters too; if the topics in your humor are
obscure, you would need to find audiences who were into obscure topics if you want to make anybody
laugh.

So you are entering into a sort of informal contract with the audience and any co-performers. We all want to
be able to express ourselves, we all have individual passions and quirks, but if we want people to applaud
for us and be sought out to perform with others, we need to conform enough that our audiences and co-
performers are also happy.

Jazz players learn this contract by listening to and performing jazz. Reading about the contract can give
you great insights, but some of the tenets of the contract have to do with how things sound or feel and it’s
difficult to internalize them in any other way.
So to wrap up this section, here is my claim: if you want to learn to play walking jazz lines well, you need to
listen to and remember a lot of jazz. You can do this listening and learning to play at the same time, so if
your interest in jazz is new, don’t despair because it’s going to take you probably the same amount of time
to learn to walk as it took anybody else. You’ll just be learning the music at the same time that you’re
learning to play it.

The Steps

When it comes to instruction, I have a strong preference for methods that are prescriptive; in other words,
they say, do this first, then do this next. This doesn’t mean that I think there is exactly one right way to learn
to play walking bass and that I know what it is. Rather, I like using this method because it makes it easier to
stay busy, since all you need to do is follow a list. For this reason I’m going to write out my approach here
in a prescriptive way, but when I teach people I don’t have some strict script and this is not some rigorously
tested process. So here we go.

Step 1 was to read all the stuff I wrote above this. If you didn’t do that, go back and read it now, since 99%
of what you need was there.

Step 2 is to start thinking about how you are going to actually play jazz with people. If you learn to play jazz
by yourself, you will only know how to play jazz by yourself, and when you try to play it with other people,
you will discover that you don’t know how to do that. However, answering this question is somewhat
complicated, and chances are that if you’re reading this, you’re trying to figure out how you can learn to
play walking bass lines TODAY. So I’m going to talk you through how to actually play something RIGHT
NOW and then I’m going to deliver a big lecture immediately after this section. If you’re not in a hurry, you
should go read that section now.

Step 3 is to get some stuff. Presumably you already have a bass.

● A computer that runs Windows, OSX, or Linux.
● A copy of Transcribe! (https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html). Using the trial
version is fine, you can buy it later if my advice works out for you. It runs on Windows, OSX, and
Linux. I will try to update this doc to help with readers who have only a phone or tablet, but if you’re
reading this, I haven’t found a good solution for those yet.
● A set of headphones. High fidelity is not important. You just need something that enables you to
pick out details in a recording. I have used everything from 15$ Philips to 700$ Sennheisers and it
made absolutely no difference in the process.
● Some kind of small mixer or audio interface that will allow you to blend audio from your bass and
your computer into your headphones. Any inexpensive USB audio interface will work well.
● A copy of Jamey Aebersold Volume 2 Nothin But Blues
(https://www.jazzbooks.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_code=V02DS). The
digital download version is fine because we’re only going to use the mp3 files.

If you can’t get all these things, don’t sweat it. If you’re motivated and clever you’ll be able to figure out how
to work around not having access to them. I’m just being very specific because some students struggle
with vague instructions.

Step 3 is to start Transcribe and use File -> Open to load track 4 from the Aebersold book. The window will
change to a display of the waveform of the left and right channels of the audio from the mp3, like this:
Step 4 is to mark the measures. Every Aebersold track begins with somebody (usually Aebersold himself)
counting the tune off. Since this is a blues, Jamey is going to count 1, 2, 3, 4 (the blues are in 4/4) and then
the tune will start. Your job is then to press the m key on the first beat of the first measure. Let the tune
keep playing, and at the end of every measure, hit m again. I used the View -> Zoom Out menu item a few
times to fit more of the track into the window, which should look something like this:
Keep doing this until you’re about to create measure marker 13, and instead of pressing m, press s
instead. When you do that, instead of seeing a marker for measure 13, you’ll see the letter A appear
instead. Press m again for every measure until you get to 13 again, when you’ll press s. Now you’ll see
marker B.

You’ll screw up a lot the first time you do this. When you do, use the pause button, then right click the
marker that is in the wrong place and use the Delete This Marker option to get rid of the bad ones, or the
Convert to Section Marker if you accidentally pressed m instead of s, or Convert to Beat Marker (we use
beat markers for measures) in the other case.

You’re going to wind up with a window that looks something like this, when you use the Zoom Out option a
few times.
The 12 bar form is repeated 6 times. If you like, you can right click on measure one and use Convert to
Section Marker, so you you wind up with sections A through F, each of which are 12 bars long

The Aebersold recordings are very helpful when learning to transcribe because the bass is panned entirely
to the left audio channel, and the piano entirely to the right. To hear what I mean, click the button in the top
row of controls marked FX. On the Mono/Karaoke tab, click the Active radio button, then click the button
marked Left. You’ll hear bass and drums but no piano. Click the Right button and you’ll hear piano and
drums but no bass.

You will also notice that there is no melody on the recording. For now, we’re going to consider the bass line
to be the melody, since Rufus Reid plays a really great one on this track. We will talk about melody from
the perspective of a bassist later on

Step 5: Transcribe Bar 1

On the waveform window, move the pointer so that you’re directly underneath measure marker 1, double
click and drag to make a selection under measure marker #2:
Now put on your headphones and press the Play button. The section should play in an endless loop, but
it’s likely that your markers or the selection you made with the mouse are not right on. Use the View ->
Zoom In option and adjust the selection or move the markers as necessary.

I tidied my selection up a little like this:

Each hump in the top waveform is a bass note, so they’re pretty easy to pick up.

You need to be able to hear your own bass through the headphones.

This recording was made on an ordinary upright bass, which is tuned the same way as a four string electric
bass, so anybody with a four string electric bass in standard tuning will be able to play this walking line.

The first note of the first bar is an F, which you will play on the first fret of the E string. Your job is to figure
out what the other pitches are and to play them in a loop until you can play the first bar effortlessly.

Chances are that if you’ve been playing bass for some time already, you might have some experience with
learning bass lines by ear. However, I’ve met many players who have never transcribed from a recording
before and believe that it’s impossible for them. Many players, when faced with the difficulty of learning by
ear, will turn to the internet and its endless supply of bass tablature. They can figure out the rhythms on
their own, but rely on the tablature to show them where to put their fingers.

Although tablature is a really efficient way to help other players learn how to finger a really difficult passage,
relying on it as a substitute for your ear means that your skill for playing something that you’ve heard will be
weak. That skill is like a muscle, hidden somewhere in your body. When you first attempt to transcribe a
bass line using only your ears and your hands, it’s like using some muscle you didn’t know you had for the
very first time. It’s weak and needs to be exercised.

It’s why we use headphones: we want the most direct path from the recording to your ears and your brain.
We use the looper, which provides the repetition that we need to create strength, without having to listen to
the whole song over and over. Also we keep the weights light: if you can’t transcribe a full measure,
shorten the selection so that you’re looping two beats at a time.
Hundreds of times while transcribing, I’ve had to loop just one or two notes in a fast solo and listen to the
loop dozens of times until I was sure that I was hearing it correctly. You should not be worried at all if you
struggle, and it’s not a bad sign that you’ll be bad later.

Step 6: Extend the Selection

Once you can play the first bar several times in a row, double click and drag directly under measure marker
two and extend the selection out to measure three:

Transcribe will keep on playing, but now it’s going to be looping two bars instead of one.

You will notice that Rufus Reid doesn’t just play quarter notes in the second bar, there’s a triplet on beat
four.

Step 7 - Memorize the First Two Sections

I can’t give you detailed instructions about this task because it depends on your own unique learning style.
The general instruction, however, is that you should memorize the first 24 bars of Rufus Reid’s walking line
on the Aebersold track. I usually memorize tunes about four bars at a time, then memorize the second four
bars, then play through the first eight bars until I think I’ve got those down. Then I repeat the process
starting on the ninth bar, and so on. You might be able to memorize an entire twelve bars at a time, or you
might need to do it two bars at a time.

Often you’ll need to repeat this step several times over the course of a few days. I usually forget a chunk of
stuff overnight, but usually after three or four days it begins to stick. All that matters is that you memorize
the first twenty four bars of bass.

Step 8 - Play Without the Guide

Once you think you have it down, press the FX button, and on the Mono/Karaoke tab, make sure Active is
selected, and click the Left button so that you’re only hearing drums and piano. Now try to play the line you
memorized. Often you will find that you need to attempt this in sections as well, since the bass track on the
recording is a strong guide which, when taken away, stops providing the cues you needed to get through
the piece. If you can’t play those twenty-four bars from memory, keep working at it until you can.

Playing jazz is all about learning to hear, memorize, and repeat, which is why this process of listening,
memorizing, and repeating is so important. If you cannot listen, memorize, and repeat, you will not be able
to play jazz.
The term transcription is frequently used to refer to the act of listening to a piece of music and recording it
as musical notation, i.e. notes on a staff. If you know music notation, it’s a great idea when you’re
memorizing a piece of music like the Rufus Reid bass line to write it out, but in our scenario, writing the
notation isn’t as important as the listening and memorization components. If you never played bass in a
school ensemble where sight reading was routine, notation may be unfamiliar to you, but that does not
mean you cannot play jazz, it just means that you will have an opportunity to learn to read notation as part
of learning to play jazz.

Your challenge is, using your ear and your hands, to figure out what Rufus Reid is playing during these
twenty-four bars, and then to go on and memorize the next twenty-four bars, and then to go on to
memorize the next twenty-four bars of a new song, and so on. There’s no set schedule; maybe it’ll take you
a week to do this first tune, and the second tune will take you five days.

If you are skeptical that memorizing somebody else’s bass lines from jazz records is the way to learn to
play jazz because there isn’t any memorization of music theory involved, I understand, since I think I would
also have been skeptical. I’ve now been playing jazz for about thirty years, and playing bass for longer than
that, and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have a number of incredible jazz musicians as teachers, all of
whom are accomplished theoreticians and/or arrangers, and what all those teachers had in common was
an intense focus on transcription as the path to improvisation.

Once you can play a few serviceable walking lines on standards, it is natural to move on to exercises
based on theory concepts, enclosures, major or melodic minor modes etc, but as a bassist, your first job is
to be able to just play a few walking lines that don’t sound bad, even if they are somebody else’s lines.
Practicing your scales and arpeggios certainly can’t hurt but it’s not the path to walking well.

So now that you’ve transcribed twenty-four bars of Rufus Reid playing the blues, what is next? The answer
is complicated because in order to know what to work on next, you need to make some decisions about
how you plan to use your newfound skill of playing walking bass lines over blues changes.

Section Three (The Real Step 2) - Figuring Out What to Play

Jazz is a style that has evolved over time. While there are sounds from the jazz of a hundred years ago
that still appear in performances today, there have been a number of periods during which the overall
sound of jazz made dramatic shifts. These changes in direction were like forks in the road; some players
chose to follow the new avant sound, while some elected to stick with the existing tradition. As a result, we
have some contemporary players who prefer the material and sound of 20s-30s era jazz, another cohort
who gravitate toward 70s fusion playing, and a solid middle core who continue to be fixated on the late 50s-
early 60s sound.

To get an idea of how the sound of jazz can evolve quickly, check out this recording of Charlie Parker
playing Billie’s Bounce fifteen years earlier with a young Miles Davis on trumpet and Curly Russell on bass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mRaEzwTYo. This period is often referred to as the Cool Jazz Era.

There is no best flavor of jazz, but most players I know have some favorite players and favorite eras. If your
goal is to play jazz with other people, you need to find the people who like some of the music that you like,
and you should plan to learn some of the music that they like. If you don’t already have some favorite
players and recordings, addressing that is the next step.

Group Opportunities

Before you can decide what music you should be listening to, you need to address the matter of who you
are going to be playing jazz with. For every hour you spend playing with others, you will probably spend
dozens or hundreds of hours practicing on your own, but it is not possible to learn to play group-oriented
music without group practice. Playing along with recordings is an essential practice tool, but you will find
that the first time you play a tune that you have played a hundred times with a recording can feel almost
impossible to play the first time you attempt it in a group setting.

Scouting out opportunities to play with others, such as at local jazz jams, will guide your choices of music
to listen to. The most likely opportunity you will have to play with others are at open jams. These are
gatherings of musicians who are interested in playing jazz, usually of broadly varying age and skill level,
and with varying tastes in material. It is common for jams to be run by a leader or group of leaders who will
try to ensure that everybody gets a chance to play and to help put together groups with the right blend of
skill levels. These groups usually choose a few tunes from what are referred to as standards.

Standards

The term standard is similar to the term cover, as in cover band, in which a group of musicians play their
own renditions of some popular song. There is no single official list of jazz standards, but there are
somewhere between one and two hundred songs that almost all experienced players have memorized, or
know well enough to stumble through.

Many standards started as original compositions by jazz artists like Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker, but
many come from other traditions, such as show tunes adopted from Broadway theater. From the 40s
through the 60s, this informal Jazz canon expanded rapidly, with standards coming in and out of fashion.
Many original compositions by players of that era reached standard status as well, for example just about
anything Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk ever wrote.

At a typical jazz jam, the leader might ask you to pick from a list of standards the ones you know well
enough to play, and then slot you with a drummer, pianist or guitarist, and some horn players who all know
three of the songs you picked. When it’s your turn, the group of you will take the stage, somebody will
count you in, and you’ll play the tune. This will be intimidating at first, but you can make things easier for
yourself by having memorized all the tunes you pick before attending the jam. But how to decide which
tunes to memorize?

Standards Composition

The idea of memorizing hundreds of standards seems daunting if not outright impossible. For bassists,
however, there are some characteristics of popular standards that aren’t obvious but which make playing
unfamiliar standards much easier than you would expect.

When jazz players memorize a new standard, they usually need to learn:

● The key signature of the chart, like F Major or Bb Minor. Sometimes it changes in a song.
● The head of the tune. This is whatever melody that the ensemble plays at the beginning and
usually the end of the tune after the solos, the theme of the song.
● The structure of the song, which is the length of any repeated sections and the order that the
sections are repeated in, like verse/verse/chorus/verse. Jazz players use letters like A/B/C to
distinguish these sections.
● The changes of the song, which I’ll describe now.

Players at jazz jams will often bring along collections of charts for the standards that they play. These
charts very rarely include any written lines other than the head, so even if you read music well, there’s not
going to be a written bass line in the chart, but the chart will at least show how many sections the tune has,
and how long each section is.

The bass staff of the chart will include chord symbols, which provide an idea of the kind of harmony that will
be played during that measure. I use the term idea because these charts are not authoritative and are the
subject of frequent dispute, and they don’t tell you explicitly what you should be playing, just that on the
record, it sounded kinda like the named chord. Let’s take a look at a couple of these charts:
I picked Mr. P.C. and Billie’s Bounce because they share something in common though you might not hear
it immediately. They’re both based on the 12-bar blues changes (Billie’s Bounce being an F Major blues
and Mr. P.C. a C Minor blues) which are the first set of jazz changes you need to learn as a bassist due to
the large number of standards that use the blues changes. Once you’re able to walk over both major and
minor blues, you can draw from lines you’ve learned on other blues standards, which will sound right at
home.

Another set of common changes in standards, referred to as Rhythm Changes, are the changes used in
the classic Gershwin show tune I Got Rhythm from the play Girl Crazy. The composition caught the ears of
jazz composers and wound up as the basis for dozens of standards (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_changes#Examples ).
The Rhythm Changes are busier than the blues changes and will likely take you longer to internalize, but
as with blues based standards, once a bassist has a vocabulary of rhythm changes, it’s like learning a
dozen tunes for the price of one.

Turnarounds

Most of the remaining standards in the catalog don’t have changes based on other songs, but they do
share segments of musical DNA called turnarounds. A turnaround is a set of chords played in succession
that leads up to landing on a final chord that finishes some phrase. Turnarounds are a lengthy topic, but I
want to mention them here because many of the sections of walking lines that you learn via transcription
are going to be notes played in a turnaround. Once you learn to play over a particular turnaround on one
tune, you can reuse that phrase just about anywhere the same turnaround appears in another standard. A
common turnaround like the ii-V-I is in practically every standard, and sometimes most of the standard is
turnarounds, so a huge part of what you play may be lines you’ve played before.

When I mentioned earlier that much of the theory I learned was on the job, this is what I was referring to.
When you find pieces of lines from one tune that seems to fit perfectly on another, it is usually because the
underlying changes are one of these common turnarounds. As you acquire this knowledge, your ears will
learn to identify ii-V-Is in a song, and your eyes will learn to see them on a chart, and you will gather theory
like a snowball rolling down a slope.

Fake Books

The challenge in attending jams is that beginners can’t be expected to have learned hundreds of songs in
advance, and if three beginners attend a jam each knowing a handful of songs, odds are good that they
won’t all know any songs in common. To aid in this scenario, a series of what are collectively known as
fake books were put together by Berklee students in the 1970s, initially published in a clandestine manner
to avoid copyright claims. The most commonly encountered fake book, The Real Book Volume 1, contains
charts of 400 standards that were frequently called at jams when the book was assembled. As the book
became popular underground, additional volumes with new songs or standards that had been forgotten in
earlier volumes.

In the previous section I mentioned that relying too heavily on bass tablature comes with the risk that you
may not learn to work out fingerings for bass lines on your own. Fake books come with a risk of their own:
that you will not learn to remember the changes to the tune if you are relying on the book to remember
them for you. I made this mistake myself, and it was the single greatest impediment to developing as a jazz
bass player that I made

I still have my fake books, which are falling apart after having been lugged around in a gig bag for thirty
years, but instead of using them as a guide, I treat them like wikipedia. When I don’t know something, I go
look it up, but we can’t play music as a group if one of us is sitting staring at a computer screen. It’s so
tempting to want to be able to rely on the book rather than our heads to memorize tunes, but it is precisely
those mental muscles that you develop by memorizing tunes which make you an adept player.

Section Four - Moving On

Your final task is to find recordings of the tunes in the Top 100 standards list without regard to who
recorded them, or when. Obviously many of the recordings will have been made by artists we now think of
as giants of their era, but new recordings of standards get made every year by both well-knowns and
unknowns. An excellent resource for finding popular recordings of standards is at:

https://www.jazzstandards.com/compositions/index.htm

I’ve already mentioned that you should focus initially on blues and rhythm-changes tunes. I’m going to
leave it to you to figure out what those are.
Also in the top hundred list, you’re going to find a lot of tunes which fall into another handful of categories:

● Ballads, on which you generally won’t walk but will play either a 2/4 or 3/4 feel.
● Latin standards, where you will be playing clave rhythms
● Bird tunes. These are charts that Charlie Parker wrote which are just absolutely everywhere.
Donna Lee, Ornithology, Scrapple From the Apple. They’re packed with ii-V-Is and the more of them
you learn the easier they all get.
● Tricky tunes, Waltz for Debby, Round Midnight, Stablemates, etc.

As I said earlier, playing these tunes with recordings is the most basic way in which you can learn them;
they are not really learned until you can play them with people, and this means being able to play them with
a bunch of people who are as good or bad as you are. The only way for that to happen is that you play
with people.