Check out this free lesson from Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman on this classic Americana Walking Bass Line. Be sure to click the link for the free tabs to go along with this lesson.
Introduction
Hey everybody how’s it going? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson. Today I want to show you a Classic Americana Walking Bass Line, but the whole idea here of what we’re looking at is for adding this walking bass line into it, so how you can take notes from the scale and you can use it to make notes that lead into your chord change or to come out of your chord change, it’s a really common kind of technique in that style of playing. So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look at this Classic Americana Walking Bass Line.
Classic Americana Chord Progression
All right so the first thing let’s just go over the chords that we’re going to be using in this Classic Americana Walking Bass Line. We’re going to be using a C major… so third fret of the A string with my third finger, second fret of the D string with my second finger, G string is open, first fret of the B string with my first finger and your high E is open… Okay next we have F… so for F I’m on the third string fret of the D string with my third finger, second fret of the G string with my second finger and I’m barring my first finger across the first fret of the B and high E strings. And then we have G7… so for G7 I’m on the third fret of the low E with my third finger, second fret of the A string with my second finger and the D, G and B strings are open and on the first fret of the high E with my first finger…
Walking Bass Line Ascending
Alright so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to be taking notes from the C Major scale to make our pickup notes, our little notes to tie things together from going into the chord and from coming out of the chord. So first we’re going to start off here with this G; so my third finger here on the third fret of the low E to the fifth string open to the second fret and then to the third fret and that’s where you’re going to drop to a C… Ok, for the strum that I’m doing for this it’s like… so when we get to that root note of the chord, that C… All right so now on to the next part we’re going to start off with that C note here, third fret of the fifth string, to the open D string, to the second fret and then to the third fret, so now we’re going C, D, E, F, I’m doing the same picking and strumming, so far…
Walking Bass Line Descending
All right, so now we’re going to start descending Classic Americana Walking Bass Line, to go back down. So now we start off with that F; so third fret of the D string with my third finger, to the second fret, to open… So when we come back down we basically do the same thing… so now C, B, A, G7… and it just starts over. Okay so one of the things that I’m doing here to kind of help make the transition changes nice and smooth and this will also help you to make less mistakes in general when playing this. I’m planting that first finger here on the second fret of the B string and I’m just keeping it there, so when I do my little my little walk up and I’m all ready for the C… ready for the F… back to C… and then when I go to the G7 I just move my first finger from the B string first fret to the high E first fret…
Variations
All right so there are lots of other things you can do with this Classic Americana Walking Bass Line aside from that, that’s just one example. You can use these connecting notes like that for other chord changes and stuff. So if you’re doing C… walk down to the B to A minor… G to an E minor if you wanted to or to an F, it depends on what key you’re playing in. A thing that I’ll throw in that’s kind of really unrelated, but something that really helped me out a lot was once I realized that the difference between playing in the key of G major and C major is just one note is different, if you’re in the key of C you have an F, but if you’re in a key of G you have an F sharp so that means that A minor, the relative to C Major and E minor, the relative of G Major, you can play lots of stuff just overlapping out of those two things just by changing that one note you change the key. All right, so that whole sequence again slowly…
Conclusion
All right, so I hope you enjoyed Classic Americana Walking Bass Line and you got something out of it. If you like the lesson hit that thumbs up button. Leave me a comment down below if there’s something you’d like to see covered in a future lesson by either myself or one of the other instructors at GuitarControl.com. If you have not already done so please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so that you don’t miss any of the content that we upload throughout the week. Anyway that is all I’ve got for you today. Thanks for watching Classic Americana Walking Bass Line and have a great day.
If you really want to dig into this style of guitar click here.
