The Bass
The bass, whether it is an upright, an electric bass, or a computer pumping out synthesized notes, is an important instrument in dance music. With the drums and percussion, the bass keeps the basic rhythm going,
but it also serves to delineate the subdivision of the beat in dances such
as samba or swing.
Here are some sections about what the bass part in various kinds of dance music does. If you haven't already done so, please first read the section on chords and scales.
Sometimes the bass plays a pattern called walking bass that makes
it very easy to hear the beat. Walking bass is very common in jazz and blues music. It makes the bass into a sort of timekeeper, and, in particular in jazz, gives the drummer more freedom to play around with the rhythm. In older jazz, the drummer would play the beat with his bass drum, this is called "four on the floor". Somewhere around the second world war the role of keeper of the beat shifted to the bass player.
In walking bass, the bass plays a note on
every beat, and the notes are part of a scale.
More precisely, the bass plays little fragments of a scale. It can for instance start on a scale note and play a few notes up or down. A good example of playing down a scale is
Lou Rawls' Fine Brown Frame,. You can hear a more jazzy walking bass in
Johnny Lang's Rack em up.
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This example gives in three consecutive measures three examples of what a bass could play on the C chord in bar 4. Walking bass does not need to stick strictly to the chords: it is not as if the Bass Players Rule Book says "Every other note should be part of the chord". In fact, the art of bass playing is to make walking lines that play around the chord, enough to support the music, but not so that it becomes obvious. In addition to scale fragments, the bass can play jumps between notes, and notes outside the scale are allowed too. Here is a movie (big, small) illustrating walking bass. |
In the section on chords you saw that chords use the I, III,
and V steps relative to whatever root the chord is built on.
A very common way of playing bass parts is to alternate between the I
and V steps of the chord, also called root-fifth. This is
a very simple way of bass playing and it gives a quiet character to the
bass part. The note example in this paragraph shows root-fifth alternation in rumba (small movie, big movie); this simple alternation also appears
in country two-step (big movie). Wait. Did I just say "gives a quiet character"? Two-step is not quiet?! Well, look at it this way. In swing music at roughly the same speed as two-step (Lindy) the bass plays a whole lot more notes. As a result, two-step sounds smooth, as opposed to more lively character of fast swing.
Playing, alternatingly, the root and the fifth of a chord is simple case of a more general sort of bass pattern: the kind that outlines a chord. This means that the bass line will play the notes of a chord, and maybe some in between, and there may also be slight alterations. This kind of bass pattern is very common in blues music, such as is used for swing dancing.
A few examples:
 | Bass patterns can be build from taking the notes of a chord. |
 | With some rhythmical embellishments and a connecting note here and there, this is what you get. |
 | This is a typical shuffle bass pattern; it uses the sixth step of the scale. |
If you want to hear it all, here is a movie (big; small).
The universal bass pattern
If the bass is not playing each beat, as in walking bass, the exact beats
and subdivisions that are played heavily determine the feel of the music.
Thus the bass pattern is likely to be different for each dance, and even
each song. That said, there is a pattern that is so common that is deserves
special attention.
The pattern where the bass plays on 1(2)&3(4) (the parenthesised
counts are not played) is very common. It can be played just like this,
or with variations. (Movie, big, small) For instance, in Mustang Sally the second half
of the bar is made more syncopating. Many songs for Nightclub two-step use
a variation on the basic rhythm where the bass note on beat 3 is
left out entirely.
The basis of this pattern are the notes on beats 1 and 3;
the bar is made asymmetric by the hit just before 3. (Occasionally
the pattern is made symmetric again by inserting a note on the &
in beat 4.) With the bar made asymmetric like this, the bass serves
to reinforce the binary structure of each bar.
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This file is part of "Feel The Beat", a musicology course for dancers, by Victor Eijkhout (victor at eijkhout dot net), who appreciates being sent additions or corrections on the material in this course. Copyright 2000/1 Victor Eijkhout.
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Last modified on: Sunday, May 20, 2001.