Now I know that playing scales can be a
drag, but in my experience there’s not really
a way around it. It’s something I’ve done a
lot and continue to do today. When I was
first starting out, I found an old piano book
that belonged to my father and I adapted a
couple of exercises from that book for bass.
In Fig. 4 we want to make some music out
of these scales instead of mindlessly running
them up and down the instrument. The
idea is to make groupings of four-note cells
out of the major scale you’re playing and
really give both hands a workout. I suggest
you use this one idea as a starting point for
making up your own exercises out of major
or minor scales.
The last idea I want to put forward
to close out this column is a little more
advanced, but totally playable by anyone
out there if you spend just a little time getting the basic idea under your fingers. It’s
not only a great technique builder, but it
also deals with resolving a diminished-7th
arpeggio ( 1–
3–
5–
7) to a minor root.
You’ll notice that Fig. 5 starts out with an
ascending C# diminished-7th arpeggio and
then descends with a D minor arpeggio.
In terms of harmony, I’m thinking
about the C#dim7 functioning as an
altered-dominant chord without the root
(in this case, you could think of it as
A7
9 and play all of those notes over an
A pedal) with the resolution establishing
the root tonality of D minor. This gives
me a way of resolving from the dominant
to the root with a movement of just a
half-step (C#–D) in the bass. It also gives
me a slightly different way to think about
a straightforward minor arpeggio, and
get my fingers on the left hand working
outside of their comfort zone with some
pretty similar harmonic material.
Fig. 3
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