Jazz Improvisation for Bass with Andrea Fascetti: Chromatic Approaches Lines In Action Part 4

Jazz Improvisation for Bass with Andrea Fascetti: Chromatic Approaches Lines In Action Part 4…

I hope you have been appreciating the improvisation techniques and lessons shared here in Bass Musician magazine. I want you to remember that this is a long course about the art of improvisation, so stay tuned if you want to increase your skills about this topic.

In past lessons (Click for previous lessons), we have worked over chords, bass fingerboard, ear training and chromatic approaches, plus various suggestions on technique and transcriptions. I think that if you have been practicing correctly, you will have increased your musical skills.

So keeping with our lessons on chromatic approaches’, which I learned from my teacher Charlie Banacos and adapted it to bass using some of my personal ideas, in this lesson we will go back to the half-diminished chord (in key of c : C Eb Gb Bb), which is the fourth chord of this group of lessons.

In the past I used only one type of chromatic approach, but now you can try to use more combinations of notes. In upcoming lessons we will go on to use this kind of line over all chord types, so you’ll adapt the notes to various chord tones.

It’s time for usual homework assignment:

1) Take the exercise… 

What happens here? I wrote a very easy two-chord vamp just to show you how you can play a simple solo over a half diminished chord line using chromatic approaches. Remember: do not use a metronome! Only when you have the exercise ‘under your fingers’, should you use a metronome. As usual play the exercise as fast as you can.

2) Transpose the exercise in all keys.

3) Analyze how I used the notes and then write exercises on your own.

Good luck and have a good practice time.