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Re: Joe Pass-like looping rendition of Autumn Leaves (on YouTube)



Wow, very cool clip...a man after my own heart! I was just jamming with a 
friend
at the music store on jazz tunes today and we played this tune.

Okay, this is going to be a long post...

I like to do the walking bass + chords thing and have been working on it 
for
many years. The guy in the clip is REALLY good at it, I'm impressed. BTW, 
that
guitar is the Ibanez Pat Metheny, great guitar.

There are a lot of different approaches. Jack Grassel has a whole book 
about it
called "Big Ax". His approach uses a LOT of notes, playing the bass line 
with
the pick and then using three fingers to play all three-note chords above 
the
bass line.

When I started working on this in about 1990, I first did everything with 
the
pick, and then switched to all fingers to make it easier to play the 
chords on
offbeats, just like in the video. But I would almost always play 2 chord 
hits
per bar. Over the years I've gone to playing fewer and fewer chord hits, 
because
it's less awkward, and you don't really need them. Like a lot of the time 
I'll
only play a chord when the chord changes. It's a lot more important to 
have a
good bass line that swings, so I don't restrict playing the bass notes to 
just
the thumb.

I started out playing 4 and 5 note chords, but then reduced them to "shell
voicings", which are chords with just root-3rd-7th or root-3rd-6th of the 
chord.
Then you can get good voice leading by letting the chord notes descend in 
small
steps while the bass line moves around. That sounds really nice. Like, 
here's a
tab for the beginning of a blues in Bb (look at this in Courier font if it
doesn't look right):

  Bb7         Eb7         Bb7         Fm7   Bb7    Eb7
-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
--7-----------6-----------7-----------8-----7------6-  etc
--6-----------5-----------6-----------6-----6------5-
-----5--8--7--6--------------5--6--7--8---------7--6-
--6--------------3--4--5--6--------------7--6--------


The bass line moves around but the chord tones are all on the middle 2 
strings.
The 3rd of one chord moves to the 7th of the next, and vice versa. This 
shows
the chord tones hitting at the same time as the bass, but you can displace 
them,
like this:

  Bb7               Eb7
---------------------------------------
---------------------------------------
-----7------------------6--------------
-----6------------------5--------------
--------5---8---7---6------------------
--6------------------------3---4---5---



Bb7                  Fm7        Bb7         Eb7
----------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------
7----------------8------------7---------6----- etc
6----------------6------------6---------5-----
------5---6---7------8---------------7------6-
6--------------------------7-----6------------

On the last few chords, the chord tones come before the bass note, which 
sounds
pretty cool.

Then I started adding TECHNOLOGY (shudder) to it, and got the hexaphonic
Copeland pickup and the octave divider. There is a short clip on my page 
here of
me doing this kind comping on a "Bird Blues" with this setup:

http://tinyurl.com/23ehcx

Then I added a Boss Loop Station. Then another Loop Station to play back 
drum
loops. Then an Echoplex! Pretty soon I had this monstrosity:

http://tinyurl.com/yonu6s

What's weird is that I hardly ever use walking bass plus chords for 
looping,
because now I like to play block chord solos, and the chord tones in 
Walking
Bass + Chords get in the way when you try to solo like that. But I use it 
when I
am accompanying someone else playing a single note solo.

Chapman Stick lends itself to this kind of comping even better than the 
guitar
does, so I've worked on that, too:

http://www.marksmart.net/instruments/stick/BluesNoodling/noodling.html

But I still mainly do it with the guitar since I'm much better at it on 
guitar
than Stick.

Hope this helps, since I've been obsessing about this for a long time.

Mark Smart
http://www.marksmart.net/