august 2015

2 Free How To Play Bass Monthly Ezine | August 2015 | how-to-play-bass.com

THE HOW TO PLAY BASS MONTHLY EZINE - AUGUST 2015

Introduction

Welcome to the August 2015 monthly ezine. In this month’s issue we’re going to look at the main parts of the bass line to I Want You Back by The Jackson 5.

Now if you’ve been following me for any length of time you might recog-nize that this is a song that I’ve covered before with a video lesson. And this is a song that I’ve covered before with a video lesson - but that was four or five years ago and if you’ve seen any of my recent tutorials you’ll know that I’m working on a different way of presenting information for song tutorial lessons.

All of my older tutorials have all the sections edited into one composite video - and the whole part of chunking down the parts of the song is to make learning the song easier. That ‘chunking’ philosophy should ap-ply to the video as well - so each discrete section of the tune should have its own dedicated video so that if you’re learning say the bridge (which is the hardest part of the tune) you don’t really want to be messing about fast forwarding through the intro, the verse, the chorus and the rest of the tune BEFORE the bridge.

That’s the first major difference.

The second major difference is that on song tutorial webpages I now present the notation and tab on the webpage too and the video under-neath it so that you can instantly correlate what you’re hearing with the notation and tab. Here’s a screengrab from a recent Beatles tutorial showing this:


The third major difference is that unless I’m creating a lesson aimed directly at beginners then I’ve moved away from the style of video where I play the line and then go through it note by note and call out the note name and the fret location and string that it’s played on.

Anyone wanting to learn this song should know where to find C on the A string. Or Db. Or Ab. And so on. So instead what I do is film each sec-tion twice: the first time is played at performance tempo with either a soundalike backing track or the original track with the bass EQ’d out; and the second playthrough is with a slower chordal backing track (with rhythmic pulse). These videos are edited with picture in picture tech-nology (see the ‘red squares’ in the image above) so that you can clearly see each hand.

The fourth major difference - which is debuting today! - is that I’ve add-ed an even slower playalong - and underlaid on this slower playalong is a fretboard view and the notes appear on the fretboard view as they are played.

So by using whatever combination of notation/tab/performance tempo playalong/slow tempo playalong or super slow tempo playalong with fretboard view you SHOULD be able to pick up the parts to the song!!!


I’ll be really interested to hear your feedback on this new ‘style’ of video - so don’t hesitate to dro pme an email and let me know what you think! Your feedback helps me improve the tutorials that I offer - si it’s really important!

If my workload pans out I’ll catch you at the end of September with Sep-tember’s video tutorial! If my workload doesn’t pan out - it will be early October! See you then!

Paul Wolfewww.how-to-play-bass.com


I WANT YOU BACK by THE JACKSON 5 - bass by Welton Felder

This month’s song tutorial is the great bass line to I Want You Back by the Jackson 5. This bass line was played by a guy called Welton Felder - who played on a lot of tunes for the produc-ers who dealt with The Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson.

Felder is actually better known as the sax player from the fusion band The Crusaders - that great solo on Street Life was one of his finest hours on sax!

We’re going to chunk the song into its constituent parts and go through them one by one as discussed in the intro.

Here’s the first part of the tune - it’s the intro:

From the intro there’s a 4 bar section prior to the first verse - which looks like this:


And then there’s the Verse itself.

Now the Verse figure is pretty close to the Intro - if you take the second 4 bars of the intro pattern and repeat them twice then you’ve got the verse. For completeness sake, here’s what it looks like:

That naturally takes us to the chorus. The chorus is a variation of the 4 bar section that split the intro and the first verse:


This leads to another verse - Verse 2 is identical to Verse 1 so you can re-peat the verse that we featured on the previous page. And Verse 2 leads us to the second chorus.

The second chorus has got a couple of slight variations - there’s a nice use of the octave on the Db and the pattern you’ve learned at the end of the chorus stops abruptly as it leads to the ‘bridge’ of the tune.


This leads to the bridge section.

Here’s where it gets interesting...I’ve put a line over the first five bars of the notation and tab above. That’s because if you listen really carefully - my advice is import the original track into software like Anytune, re-pitch the entire song an octave and then apply a bass enhancing filter - you’ll hear that the bass DOESN’T start playing until the sixth bar of the bridge, and plays for just three bars before the chorus comes back in.

But if you compare and contrast with the version on the Michael Jackson album called “The Stripped Mixes” then you’ll hear ALL the notes that are included in the section above. As this is the most interesting section to play, I’m going to play all the notes as written in the tab.


After the bridge we’re onto the final section of the tune - which is the fade chorus. Here’s the pattern that you need to play:


On the original Wilton throws in the variation up the 5th and octave of Db in the first beat of the second bar...if you want to do that you can. But those are the main sections you need to play through the song.

How To Program The Sections In Band In A Box

There’s a bass less backing track to practice along with on the I Want You Back page - but if you want to program and isolate the sections in Band In A Box (and play with the tempos) here’s what to do:

1. Set key to Ab.2. Aim for performance tempo to be around 95-98 BPM3. Choose a style for practice. I would choose the 70s Soul Style Full Band as I got towards performance tempo. But I use the Chordal Metro-nome for slower playalongs. 4. Mute the bass

Here are the chords for the first part of the intro - this progression also doubles for the verse:

Here’s the chords for the 4 bars before the verse:


Here’s the progression you need to program for Chorus 1 - quick note, when incorporating 2:4 bars I often ‘cheat’ and displace the downbeats of subsequent bars, it’s much quicker to program like this:

Chorus 2 is slightly shorter:

Here’s the bridge chords when programmed:


And finally here’s what you would program for one play through of the Fade Chorus:

august 2015

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