What are Bass Guitar Melodies?

Series Summary

Because of its imaginative employment of verbal and written communication, music is one of the most powerful forms of expression that exists today. Music is unique in that it facilitates a conversation for the musician and the audience that language alone cannot, creating a connection between people that is not limited by time, distance, or relationship. That’s why music continually changes and grows, is still loved and still proliferates. Music is a living language.

If you are familiar with the bass guitar in the schema of a modern pop music, you know that its task is to help secure the underpinnings of any song. If the bassist represents the lower registers of sound like a deep and abiding force of nature, then even as a bass player, he receives the notice and acclaim he deserves, despite the fact that he’s not holding a certain six-stringed instrument with a whammy bar and wailing soul in his hands. Just ask Les Claypool what I mean.

In these free bass guitar lessons on video, you can learn some of the fundamental skills you will need to become a bass guru within the course of your lifetime. Our expert will show you how to play some beginner bass lines on a four string guitar, as well as the songs “Greensleeves” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” Although you may not come off as a bass guitar hero after playing through these lessons, there is an old adage about setting off upon a journey that comes to mind…

So, let’s get started!

Video Transcript

"Okay, so in the previous section on the bass guitar we learned the notes on the E string and the A string, the two lower strings on the bass. And we learned the melody "Mary Had A Little Lamb" as a culmination. We're going to continue now. We're going to learn the notes on the D string and the G string. We're going to learn some new melodies using those as well as throwing in extra fingering and those melodies will be "When The Saints Go marching In" and excerpt from "Greensleeves". From there, once we have mastered that first position, we'll figure out how to feel and find our way around other positions. We'll look at each string and we'll look at the step pattern of whole steps and half steps which determines the major scale, which determines the division of natural notes and from there we'll learn some scales in the next section. But before that we can use the steps pattern to do relative tuning. So if we don't have a tuner, we can use the step pattern to tune using each of the frets of the fifth fret of each string, as we'll see."