Bass Octaves in Funk Piano

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Jonathon Wilson on behalf of Expert Village.com, and we're learning how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. We've been looking at variations that we can do with typically our whole rhythmic structure in order to take our rolling groove that we've got and break it up a little bit. We've looked at a couple of techniques for that. But there are other simpler things you can do just by taking the bass part that we've already learned and altering it just slightly. Obvious things that you can do are some of the things we'll look at this time. Instead of, for those walking up patterns where we get from the C-7 to the F and we walk up those chords, you can octave that, double add an octave. Or, for a busier feel, you can alternate the octaves, which is kind of that disco-y thing from the 70's, where the bass player would go, bong di bong di bong. We'll throw some of those in to our bass line to add some busyness and some variation. Okay, so here I'm just going to play the bass line that we had before, but I'm going to throw in those variations, very slowly with the metronome, so you can watch it happening. Okay, so not much to this. This is pretty easy and straightforward, but it's just something that you can use to add variety to the bass line. Like I said, funk is all about unpredictability. We want to have lots of contrasts. We don't ever want it to stagnate. We want things to hold people's interest while we're playing. So, octaves, alternating disco things, just things you can kind of throw in from time to time, to sort of add some spice, change things around a little bit. So let's take the same patterns at full speed with the drum beat, just so you can hear how it sounds in the real context. Okay. Alright, so those are some simple variations you can do on the bass line that don't really take a lot of extra work or practice, but they can really change things around a little bit. That octave one in particular is great for really putting some aggressive emphasis on things. Obviously, when you double things in octaves, it's going to put a little bit more volume, a little bit more of aggressive sound things. A little bit more of an aggressive sound. Sometimes, that's what you want. So that's one of the techniques you can use. Next time, we're going to break things up a lot more. So far, we've talked about pretty simple changes we can make. But next time, we're going to change things around a little bit.

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