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In popular music, a walking bass is a style of bass accompaniment or line, common in jazz, which creates a feeling of regular quarter note movement, akin to the regular alteration of feet while walking (Friedland 1995, p.4).
Thus walking basslines generally consisting of unsyncopated notes of equal value, usually quarter notes (known in jazz as a "four feel"). Walking basslines use a mixture of scale tones, arpeggios, and passing tones to outline the chord progression of a song or tune, often with a melodic shape that alternately rises and falls in pitch over several bars.
Walking basslines are usually performed on the double bass or the electric bass, but they can also be performed using the low register of a piano, Hammond organ, or other instruments. While walking bass lines are most commonly associated with jazz and blues, they are also used in rock, rockabilly, ska, R&B, gospel, latin, country, and many other genres (Friedland 1995, p.4).
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Examples
Walking bass often alternates quarter notes:
giving rise to the term.
Many boogie-woogie basslines are walking bass lines:
Walking bass often moves in stepwise (scalar) motion to successive chord roots, such as often in country music:
In this example, the last two quarter notes of the second measure, D and E, "walk" up from the first quarter note in that measure, C, to the first note of the third measure, F (C and F are the roots of the chords in the first through second and third through fourth measures, respectively).
In both cases, "walking" refers both to the steady duple rhythm (one step after the other) and to the strong directional motion created (ibid); in the examples above, from C to F and back in the second, and from root to seventh and back in the first.
See also
- Bass run, a short instrumental break or fill for the bass instrument (or instruments)
Source
- Friedland, Ed (1995). Building Walking Bass Lines. ISBN 0-7935-4204-9.
External links
- Bass Lines PDF (25.1 KiB) - 244 million bass lines in F
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttpeVdSYTs[1] An audio/video example of a walking bass line played on electric bass guitar, created specifically to accompany this Wikipedia entry (GFDL/Creative Commons) by Dave Muscato, bassist of Treasure Junkie, for information purposes only.
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