One of the coolest and most badass-sounding things a guitarist can do is double a long, complex bassline an octave higher. This was my approach for the song Dean Town, which I recorded with Vulfpeck for our 2016 album, The Beautiful Game.
The tune was inspired by legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius’ Teen Town, which he recorded with Weather Report on the 1975 album Heavy Weather.
Like Teen Town, the bassline in Dean Town is a through-composed melody, which means it’s a continuous and non-repetitive piece of music.
The melody was written by our keyboard player Woody Goss and “made famous” by bassist Joe Dart. I decided to octave-double Joe’s intricate bassline through the long initial section of the tune, which was challenging!
Before launching into the melodic line, let’s take a look at the basic underlying chord changes, outlined in Figure 1. In the song, each of these notes – F#, C#, E and B – is played for two full bars, as steady 16th notes. So it’s an eight-bar loop. The tune’s melody is 16 bars long and is played over the eight-bar progression two times.
The first time the 16-bar melody, or “head,” is played, it’s performed by the bass alone. The second time through, I octave-double it on guitar.
This 16-bar melody is shown in Figure 2. Using palm-muting throughout, I begin with a one-beat pickup, and bar 1 starts with the 16th notes E-D#-C#-A, followed by the root note, F#, which falls on beat 2. Right from the start, this is a little deceptive, as the low F# root note hits you like it’s on “1,” but it is in fact on beat 2.
As you play through the line, you’ll see that it includes some complex, syncopated rhythms driven by eighth and 16th notes and rests, with many “holes” dropped into unexpected places.
Bar 6 begins with a four-note chromatic row, from F# up to A, followed by high melodic notes that bounce off open low-E 16th note syncopations. Bars 7 and 8 circle around B7 with the notes of B major pentatonic (B, C#, D#, F#, G#), which resolves in bar 9 to F#m, with the bar ending with dead-string hits and a high chordal accent on the final 16th note of the bar.
Bars 10-12 offer a break from the barrage of 16th notes with repeated eighth-note accents on the F# root note, only to return to very syncopated lines in bars 13-16.
The biggest challenge when doubling a complex, rhythmically dense bassline like this is precision. It simply will not work and will sound sloppy if I don’t nail every phrase and mirror the articulations of the bass.
Later in the tune, I play a funky rhythm part high up on the fretboard that consists of syncopated double-stops on the G and B strings, shown in Figure 3. Notice that each bar repeats and how the notes work with the underlying chord changes. Utilizing two-note chords like this is a great way to outline the harmony with just a minimal amount of information and textural density.
This is the last installment of my column Follow the Groove for now, so I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these columns and the ideas presented have been useful to you. See you on the road!
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
