How to Play Jazz Music on the Upright Bass Guitar

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Part of the video series: How to Play Upright Bass

Summary: Play jazz music the upright bass guitar using certain jazz styles and techniques; learn how with tips from our expert upright bass player in this free music lesson video.

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By Branson Garner
eHow Presenter

Branson Garner has been playing the upright bass for nearly 10 years. He has learned much about the instrument throughout those ten years. Branson played the bass in his high school...read more

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evuser1134 said

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on 4/29/2009 What you are saying is true but most things that apply to one applies equally to the other. I play Fretless Bass Guitar and in Jazz I use upright players for most of my influence.

on 1/13/2009 Please don't refer to this instrument as a "guitar." There are bass guitars and there are upright basses and they are not the same. The upright bass is acoustic, looks like a giant violin, and is also called the double bass, the string bass or the contra bass.

Video Transcript

"I’m Branson Garner, and today on behalf of expertvillage.com, we’re going to be talking about playing jazz music on the upright bass. Now the bass is really the backbone of jazz music. You may recognize, if you listen to jazz, the walking bass line is something that is crucial to it, it outlines the chords and outline the changes for the soloist to solo over. When first talking about the walking bass line, you must first focus on the right hand; that is where all our tone is going to coming from. If you put your hand right near the bottom of the fingerboard, right before it ends, and really relax everything in your hand and just pluck those strings really solid, you’ll get a nice solid tone from that bass, as opposed to something that maybe you play up here with not as much relaxation and everything. It really sounds different. Once you got this tone, then you will go to playing the walking bass line, and that is done by outlining the chord changes. As a bass player, there are chord changes, and each one of those have scales that you can go over. Say you have an A minor 7, going to a D major 7, and then a G major 7. We can play that chord as we outline the scales. I’m going to demonstrate that. As you could see, outlining those chord changes, we have the A minor 7. If you’re going to do that, you play the A minor 7 arpeggio, which is A, C, E, then may be a G in there. Then switch to D, D major, no arpeggio. Then you go to G, so you play the 1 and the 5 to give it some variety. That is how to play walking bass line. It’s basically, outlining the chord changes and outlining the scales, and using those certain notes to create a certain feel of what you want to play jazz music."

eHow Article: How to Play Jazz Music on the Upright Bass Guitar