February's LOTM is a super versatile walking bass ii V I. I've taken it from the 'Solar' bass transcription I posted last week. It's really simple which makes it easy to apply to a lot of tunes.
With out further ado, the lick!
This lick is about as straight forward as it gets, but that isn't a bad thing! Bar 1 we've got R,5,R,3. Bar 2 is R,5,7 followed but a 4th although I see this more as a chromatic note leading to the root of the last chord. The 4th is normally a note to be avoided, or in this case used as tension. If you find the full lick in my transcription you'll see the EbM7 continues this pattern with a major triad as well.
To start with I took this lick through all 12 keys to get familiar with it, I've shown the first three on the video. Because the line is made almost entirely from chord tones I found this quite easy compared to a lot of licks I've worked with so if you've never took anything through every key then I would suggest this as a starting point.
The thing I really love about this lick is how easy it is to alter because it's so simple to start out with. The first thing I tried with it was playing the F-7 bar upside down. This works really well as it makes you start on the 3rd of the chord rather than the root.
Trying to apply the same principle to the second bar needs a bit of adjusting otherwise you end up playing two Ab's on the run which to my ears doesn't sound that great.
Changing the start note to a Bb though opens the opportunity for a nice run down to the Eb, changing the chromatic note to an E.
Finally, this lick is great for squashing down into short ii-V's. Check out the PDF with all these licks transcribed in full here!
No comments:
Post a Comment