Bass Lines for Funk Piano

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Jonathon Wilson on behalf of expertvillage.com. We're learning how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. This time we're going to learn the main focus of any funk groove, the bass line. In our case, our chord progression, like must funk grooves, is very, very simple. C-dominate seventh to F-dominate seventh and back. Our bass line has a downbeat that you'd, you want a nice long emphasized downbeat and a couple of sort of popping offbeat?s. And then a walk up to the other chord and then it sort of repeats the same thing in F and we go back to C. It's not very complicated. It's pretty funky. Here it is very slowly with a metronome so you can hear how it works. Okay. Things to keep in mind while you're playing this. You want a nice strong downbeat and you want to kind of hold on to that note a little longer. You don't want your downbeat to be this short note. You want to really kind of hang on that note and then pop those offbeat?s. The walk can be whatever you want. Sort of short sometimes, long sometimes, it depends on how you want to do it. But generally, emphasize the downbeats, long notes, short offbeat?s. The same thing on F, in both cases. That will really help the groove settle on to its downbeats, which is a real common thing in funk patterns, is that downbeat is very strong and then you've got the back beat to sort of emphasize those beats two and four. Alright, so let's take our bass line over the drums, full speed, keeping in mind some of those funk patterns that we were just talking about. The other thing to think about is that this doesn't have to be limited to just those notes that you see on the page. You can throw in little ghosting notes. It doesn't even really matter what the pitch is, per se. You just sort of fall off of a little light ghosted note on your way down to the walk up. That's a great place to put them. I'll throw a couple of those in as well so you can hear how those sound. Here it is full speed. Okay, so that's pretty fun. Nice fat bass line, plenty to build on. It's still a little simple, but coming up next we're going to add a little bit of right hand stuff to make it even funkier.

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