A Bass Player's Guide to Harmony

How Chords Work

We'll start with the very basic mechanics of how intervals and chords work and go over techniques to help you hear intervals and chord qualities clearly and consistently.

Diatonic Modes and Chords

We'll go through the whole diatonic series in detail and learn how to use and identify these sounds. These are the basic building blocks of almost all popular songs. By the end of this segment, you'll know this stuff inside and out.

Secondary Dominants and Modal Interchange

Once we've mastered the basics we'll discuss how secondary dominant chords and modal interchange work, how they relate to key centers and how they are often used in popular songs.

Voice Leading, Inversions and Slash Chords

We'll also go over common voice leading techniques that songwriters and arrangers use to make moving between chords more interesting.

Diminished Chords, Tensions and Altered Dominant Chords

Once we've mastered everything else on this list, we'll go over more complicated sounds and how to deal with them. By the end of this segment you should be able to understand how most songs in the real book work.

The Blues

The blues has a special place in all American music. It also has some particular idiosyncrasies that differ from the rest of the Western theory system. We'll go over a basic blues, minor blues and different jazz blues forms and how the logic of the blues continues to influence modern music today.