• KingJalopy
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    1 month ago

    Scales are easy, you just have to know all the notes and whatever key of the chord you’re playing and you can improvise all of those notes on top.

    Example if you’re playing a c chord the three notes that make up a c chord are c, e, g

    So from there you know that you can play at least those three notes but if you only hit the notes in the key of C you end up with

    C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C

    Which will work

    Anytime anyone is playing a C major chord you can hit any of those notes and it will sound at least somewhat decent the trick is to land on the note that falls within the scale of the next chord for example let’s pretend the next chord is A

    Key of a is A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#, A

    Now play those notes

    Just remember that all major triad chords, which is just your basic chord, makes up only three notes, and if you look at a scale those notes are numbers 1,3,5.

    So if you’re playing a C chord the three notes involved in that quarter going to be C, E, G.

    So if you’re jamming on the court of sea in the next chord is a and make sure the note before a hits can fall into the scale of a. I hope that makes sense that’s what made me click with improvising almost 30 years ago.

    To figure out the scale for any key just remember this

    WHOLE WHOLE HALF WHOLE WHOLE WHOLE HALF

    That is whatever the chord being played is the key for that chord is (starting with the note the chord is based on) (ex C)

    W W H W W W H (C, E, G)

    OR

    C D E F G A B C

    hope this helps. Music is just math noise.

    It gets easy more crazier but that should get you started

      • cheddar@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        It’s much easier than that. You don’t really need to know any of that. On a regular guitar we have shapes. You can learn one shape and move it around the neck to play in any key:

        I assume it’s probably the same on bass.

        I’m not saying that theory is not helpful, but you aren’t thinking about it while playing or improvising.

        • mydoomlessaccount@infosec.pub
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          1 month ago

          As a bassist, I can at least say that was my experience. I learned pentatonic by paying attention to which notes I’d hear most often, and recognizing which pattern on the fretboard they usually showed up in when played in sequence.

          That was pretty much all I needed to be able to jam semi-decently, and everything else just sort of progressed from there.