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Bill Withers wrote “Grandma’s Hands” as a paean to his grandmother’s wisdom, kindness, and unconditional love. Produced by Booker T. Jones and featuring his bandmate Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass and Stephen Stills on electric guitar, it first appeared on Withers’s 1971 debut album Just as I Am. With a simple 11-bar blueslike structure and just three chords, the song’s most distinctive instrumental facet is Dunn’s quirky pentatonic bass part. The line starts with a pickup phrase, crosses the bar line, hits the downbeat on a seventh, and resolves to the tonic on an offbeat. Zoe plays and sings the song in the original key of E minor. In this video, Zoe orients you to the basic bass line, walks you through the complete song, and discusses the pentatonic scale.
Take your upright bass playing to the next level by learning great bass lines for slightly more challenging songs from a variety of idioms, including folk, rock, jazz, klezmer, and blues. In this step-up class, you’ll get experience playing in a variety of keys and different time signatures and rhythmic feels. Zoe will also offer insight into building your own bass parts, developing arrangement skills, and bumping up your overall musicianship. Along the way, she’ll provide valuable advice on right- and left-hand techniques, music theory, and more.
Zoe gives you an overview of what you’ll learn in her Intermediate Bass course. Building on what she taught in her earlier Bass course, Zoe will share songs from a variety of idioms that feature interesting bass parts, including gems from Bill Withers, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Carole King, Pentangle, Gillian Welsh, and others. She’ll also touch on a number of theoretical and technical topics, as well as some logistical issues such as how to play and sing simultaneously. As she notes in the video, her overarching goal is to set you on the path toward building your own bass parts, developing new arrangement skills, and bumping up your overall musicianship.
Learn about your guide to intermediate bass playing in this video. Zoe Guigueno (GIG-an-oh) is a Canadian bassist, vocalist, and songwriter living in Eugene, Oregon. For many years she was the bassist with the Grammy-nominated Americana group Della Mae, which toured with legendary comics and actors Steve Martin and Martin Short and was named by Rolling Stone as one of “Ten New Artists You Need to Know.” She has toured in over 20 countries, busked in a pink gorilla costume in the New York subway, performed on CBS and the Grand Ole Opry, played upright bass on a moving whitewater raft, and written and recorded two albums of her own material. Learn more on her website.
Here’s a lovely song by the now-defunct American band the Stray Birds from their 2018 album Let It Pass. The band comprised multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Maya de Vitry, Oliver Craven, and Charlie Muench. "Light as a Fire" begins with an instrumental section that also serves as an interlude between the second and third verses, and as the progression for the final “chorus” section. The original is in the key of E♭, but Zoe plays and sings it in the key of C, which is a better fit for her voice and works well for guitarists playing open chords. We provide chord charts for both keys, and guitarists can adapt to E♭by using a capo. The bass part has a basic feel similar to that in the Carole King classic “You’ve Got a Friend,” which Zoe taught in her earlier course.
Bill Withers wrote “Grandma’s Hands” as a paean to his grandmother’s wisdom, kindness, and unconditional love. Produced by Booker T. Jones and featuring his bandmate Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass and Stephen Stills on electric guitar, it first appeared on Withers’s 1971 debut album Just as I Am. With a simple 11-bar blueslike structure and just three chords, the song’s most distinctive instrumental facet is Dunn’s quirky pentatonic bass part. The line starts with a pickup phrase, crosses the bar line, hits the downbeat on a seventh, and resolves to the tonic on an offbeat. Zoe plays and sings the song in the original key of E minor.
Finding notes on the fingerboard in every key is an essential skill for any aspiring musician, and the bass presents some particular challenges given how much real estate the noting hand has to cover to reach notes in each register. In this series of short videos, starting with the key of F (one flat) and working her way counterclockwise around the circle of fifths, Zoe demonstrates how to play two-octave scales for the keys of F, B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, F#, B, E, A, D, G, and C. All of the scales will require shifts, stretches, and some challenging fingering, especially in the second octave high on the fingerboard. Zoe helps you navigate the trickier note sequences. She recommends practicing the scales along with a tonic drone, and suggests using Darol’s DRONES in All Keys, a Darol Anger recording available on Bandcamp. Notation for all of the keys is included in the first lesson: Key of F.
This month’s lesson features a transcription of a bass part from the late Danny Thompson, one of the all-time great bassists, well known for his work with Pentangle, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, and scores of other jazz, folk, rock, and blues artists. This haunting song was the title track to English singer-songwriter John Martyn’s fourth studio album. “Solid Air” was dedicated to Martyn’s fellow singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who died 18 months after this song was released. The track has a simple three-chord guitar part in a low open tuning (C G E♭ F B♭ D) which Martyn played with mostly one-finger barre chords, leaving the heavy lifting to the bass player. The bass part includes rhythmic variations, syncopations, slides, and some intriguing harmonics high on the G and D strings. As Zoe notes, studying this transcription is meant to convey an approach and a “vibe” rather than a finished part set in stone. She plays and sings the song in the original key of C minor.
