How to Play Chords on Bass Guitar

A lot of bass guitar players don't think of the bass guitar as an instrument to play chords on, but knowing chord structures on your bass can come in handy. Using chord fingerings on the bass guitar will help a musician play melodic bass lines and follow other instrumentation as a rhythm instrument in a band.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Get familiar with the fretboard. Chords are just collections of notes. On a string instrument, making chords means collecting the appropriate notes in any order and using your fingering patterns to construct them.

2. Modify guitar chords to the bass guitar. On the bass, you're dealing with 4 strings instead of 6. For chords, this means that some of the notes will be "lost" on a bass, so to make good bass guitar chords, you need to know what notes to keep and what to lose.

3. Locate "open" and "barred" chord structures. Open chords are chords that can only be played at the bottom of the bass guitar fretboard because they include open strings. Barred chords can be moved around the neck to change key, because all 4 of the strings are in a fixed position. Because the bass guitar only has 4 strings, again, it's easier to make bar chords.

4. Add or subtract from barred chords to create new barred chords. This will enable you to play multiple chord structures anywhere on the neck and get more versatile in picking notes out in compositions.

5. Experiment with picking technique. While guitarists are used to "strumming" chords on the six-string by playing all strings at the same time, strummed chords don't sound as good on the bass guitar because the strings are thick and the notes are very low. In many cases, it's better to try picking strings one after the other for a "cascading" chord sound where each note is clearly heard and enjoyed.