How to Play a Solo on the Upright Bass Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Branson Garner on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today we’re going to be talking about soloing on the upright bass—soloing, particularly in jazz music. When first talking about soloing, the first thing to realize is a good solo always follows the changes. So if you have a C, then an F, then a B flat change, you could solo using the arpeggio method. Alright, the next technique would be using guide tones, which is basically hitting on say beats 1 or beats 2 and 4. And outlining the chord progression along the middle, just basically hitting into chromatic or anything like that. Again, going with our C minor to F to B flat. This is what it would sound like. That is basically how we use guide tones. Remember just taking the chord, outlining them on beats 1, and say beats 1 and 4, just directly into beat 1, if you like, and outlining the chord and playing chromatics or anything in between. The last technique that we are going to talk about in soloing, is blanketing. That basically is, say you have your C 5 or C, F, B flat progression that we are talking. C minor, F minor, or B flat or F major. You take one scale or one mode. In this case, I’ll take F dominant, F major or minor F dominant 7. We take that and blanket it all over the progression. This is what it will sound like. Alright, that’s it. You can also take for instance; it doesn’t have to be an F. Maybe it’s not even a chord or scale in the change. Say you have your C minor at progression, say you want to play an E flat scale over it, it would sound pretty cool. That’s another technique you can use. Just take any other scales and blanket it over the entire progression. That’s another way we can take our solos to the next level."