Paul Wolfe

Creating bass lines in any genre isn't done by grabbing a note from here and a note from there and putting them together and seeing if they sound OK.

Bass lines have their own language.

Tthe language of bass lines is built up from ideas that I refer to as devices - there's a secondary level too including modifying devices and connecting devices. These devices can be executed at different rhythmic levels and with different rhythms.

I started transcribing and analyzing bass lines at a deep level in 2010.

Bass players whose work I dived into included Geddy Lee, James Jamerson,Paul McCartney, Tommy Shannon, Rocco Prestia, Bruce Thomas, Carl Radle, Berry Oakley, John Paul Jones. And dozens of others.

In all the work of these players that I analyzed I found something amazing:

...each of these bass players bass lines were composed from the same devices.

And I set out to codify the devices (and modifying devices and connecting devices) that you can find in the bass lines of nearly all players in rock and pop (and country and soul and reggae).

What's interesting (and almost unbelievable) is that not only does no-one else teach this, but the number of mentions I've seen of this idea in other bass literature could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The overall approach I've pioneered is called The 80-20 Device Method (for bass players).

I'm hard at work in my writing shed on a series of books looking at genre applications (e.g. blues rock, soul, funk), player applications (e.g. learning from James Jamerson) and how beginners can use these devices to learn to play bass (e.g. How To Play Bass In 50 Songs).

www.how-to-play-bass.com