Practice Drill For Walking Bass Lines
Learn a walking bass line practice drill for beginner blues piano players. This walking bass line is perfect to use on the 12 bar blues and 8 blues forms.
Octave Bass Lines For Blues
We can play octave bass lines when playing the slow blues and also in faster blues-based styles such as Boogie Woogie piano. Here is an example octave walking bass line over a C7 chord that is commonly found in the blues:
Later in the video we will explore an exercise for this style around the 12 bar blues.
Bass Line Muscle Memory & Hand Independence
To play octave-based bass lines in blues we must develop our muscle memory so that our hand remembers a precise distance between the tip of our little finger and the tip of our thumb.
Unlike all other intervals, the octave interval is always the same distance no matter what notes we are playing, and so once we have internalised the feel of the interval we can play it effortlessly up and down the piano.
Walking Bass Line Around 12 Bar Blues
The following pattern can be played around the entire 12 bar blues form. Ensure that you connect the walking bass line smoothly between the chords and keep a steady comping pattern in the right hand:
Once comfortable with this basic pattern we can then start to walk the bass line and add some swing feel into our left hand as demonstrated in the lesson.
Lesson Downloads
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Slow Walking Bass Line Demonstration File Type: pdf -
Practice Drill For Hand Independence File Type: pdf
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Walking Bass Lines Patterns File Type: pdf
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Walking Bass Lines Transcriptions File Type: pdf
Related Lessons
In this lesson Jon takes us through some left hand variations on a 12 bar blues including walking bass lines and the New Orleans style tuba bass lines.
You will immediately notice that this tune does not follow the standard 12 bar blues form that we have covered earlier in this course.
Walking bass is the most common type of bass that you will hear in jazz and jazz blues on the organ. In this lesson we explore the theory.
Practice Tips
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Octave bass lines are generally played with our left hand thumb on the top note and our little finger on the bottom note.
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The first practice exercise is to move the octave interval up and down the keyboard chromatically.
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Next pick notes at random and make sure that you can hit the octave cleanly without hitting the adjacent notes.
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Practice the exercise presented for the 12 bar blues in C and once you are comfortable with the double octave, add the walk where we stagger the notes and add some swing.
