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Looper's Delight
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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/