How To Turn A Bass Line Into A Guitar Solo
What do a bass line, a chord progression, and a solo all have in common? Turns out, quite a lot. Let’s spice up our playing by applying these concepts to a blues song.
In a 12 bar blues song, often the first 4 bars stay on one chord, and the switch to the next chord happens at the beginning of the 5th bar. This change is usually from the I to the IV chord. There are countless ways to get from the I chord to the IV chord, but today I want to focus on a couple transitions that can make these first 4 bars of the blues a lot more exciting—both for us to play and for the listener’s ear. Let’s have a look.
A lot of us have probably used a walking bass line to transition from the I to the IV chord. Something like this:
Note: The tab is in Open D tuning. This will work perfectly for all similar tunings, including Open E.
This bass line alone is a nice transition to let the ears know that the chord is about to change. But we don’t have to stop there. This bass line can be harmonized in chords. And not just in one way, but many. For example, instead of playing single bass notes, we can build dominant seventh chords from each of those bass notes. That would look like this:
We can also keep the same bass line, but change the quality of the chords.
This transition introduces minor seventh chords that are actually found in the key of D major, along with a diminished seventh chord which itself serves as a wonderful bridge between the Em7 and F#m7 chords. The same bass line is still there, but the harmony built on top of each bass note has changed a bit, and gives us a different flavor than the previous example of using only dominant seventh chords.
People often get to this point and stop, satisfied that they have a few ways of moving from the I to the IV chord. But there’s another step that can greatly benefit our soloing. Imagine taking these chords we’ve built as a bridge between the I and IV, and playing them as individual notes on the high strings. This is not only a viable soloing technique—it’s one used by nearly all professional guitarists. Let’s have a look, starting by playing that same bass line on the second string.
This can now be the backbone of our solo as we play through the chord changes. This is what happens when we take the chords in our previous example (D7 – Em7 – Fdim7 – F#m7) and play them on the top three strings:
All we’re doing in that example is taking three notes from each chord, and playing those notes as arpeggios. Specifically, the notes are the root, 3rd, and 7th of each chord. (If you aren’t confident as to what the root, 3rd, and 7th refers to, you can check out the article on triads and video on seventh chords to gain a solid understanding.) You can choose any three of the notes in the four note chord, and it will sound good. As you can guess, there are many variations of this soloing concept. We can even just play two notes from each chord:
That’s how you turn a simple bass line into a chord progression and solo lines. Your solos don’t have to be random combinations of scale notes—they can outline chord progressions in an interesting way, guiding the listener’s ear from one chord to the next.
If you enjoyed this lesson, the 3+ hour video course Mastering Open D Tuning will take your playing to the next level. You’ll learn music theory from the ground up, gaining the knowledge to truly improvise while learning chords and scales all around the neck. If reading is more your style, check out the book Mastering the Fretboard in Open D also discusses these concepts.
I also offer private guitar and songwriting lessons.
Happy Playing,
Jake Shane
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