hi my name is John Goldsby you're about to watch a video from my discover double bass
course Tell Your Story: Creating a jazz bass solo enjoy
let's talk about guide tones guide tones is a term uh referring to the upper structures
of chords that define the quality of the chord whether the chord is major or minor whether the seventh of the chord is major or minor
and uh any alterations on the dominant chords
uh on autumn leaves you can pick a lot of cool guide tones and the melody is actually based on
uh what we would call guide tones here are some guide tones that i i chose through the uh
yeah melody and harmony to autumn leaves one two three four one
one two three
now you can pick your own guide tones there are many paths through the harmony and uh that's
part of the uh reflection of telling your story it's the way you hear it through these changes
and if you hear different soloists play you'll hear that they take different paths through
the harmony one thing i like to do is take these guide tone ideas and just hook them up with yeah
scale passages arpeggios or chromatic passages one of the problems with bass players improvising
solos that i hear when they're starting out as they feel like they've walked all these choruses
and then when they get to the bass solo it's something different
they all of a sudden they have to start playing licks
licks are nice they help you get around the bass but to me the solo is just as organic as
the baseline it just describes a different part of the tune in a different way so what i'm going
to do now i'm going to take these guide tones and just connect them with i'm not sure what chords
scales or chromatic uh you know passing phrases uh the one thing i'll mention as you'll notice
in measure 14 uh i didn't pick one particular guide tone i just put the whole de-altered scale
you can pick any of those notes as a guide tone you can play the whole scale
you can play a phrase from that scale so here's my take on this guide tone exercise
so here's autumn leaves one two one two three four one
so the great thing about guide tones is they're to me they're just like the bass
line like finding the root on beat one you can find a guide tone on beat one
and then you can lead into the next guide tone rather than hit the chord and then play your lick
that's a concept i really adhere to and i try and teach my students they should play into the
guide tones and that keeps the forward motion going in your solo thanks so much for watching
if you want to learn more about the course the links to the videos are provided below