Bass Lessons - Jamming To P.funk bass tab

Every bassist learns to play a few funk songs at some point in

his life, for obvious reasons. Funk is a lot of fun to play because

of its interesting rhythms and the prominent role that the bass

plays in it. But the really fun part of funk music, as in many kinds

of music, is being able to improvise to it, to do your own thing

while jamming to an old favorite. This lesson will hopefully

teach you the theory behind funk music and give you a starting

point from which to start improvising.

The two songs that I'll have you jamming to are both from Parliament's

Mothership Connection. They are, Unfunky UFO and Give Up the

Funk. We'll start with Give Up the Funk, which is in the key of

E Dominant. For those of you with a little bit of music theory

already under your belt, you should know that this means that

while jamming to this song, you can play over the E Dominant scale,

which looks something like this:

---------------6--7--9-

-------6-7--9----------

--7--9-----------------

-----------------------

And you should also know that the first, third, fifth, and seventh

notes in that scale are the chord tones.

So, to begin, we can put on the song and try to improvise some over

the E Dominant scale, sticking to mostly chord tones ( the first

3rd 5th and 7th notes ). Make sure that at first you keep things

simple. Feel that funky rhythm, always play on the first beat

of each measure and add on from there. Always make things interesting

rhythmically before you try to make them interesting note-wise.

Jam to that for a while.

After you've become comfortable jamming like this we can move

on and start to learn another way to jam over funk songs. Because

Give Up the Funk is in E Dominant we can jam to it not only in the

E Dominant Scale, but in the E Blues Scale, which looks a bit like

this:

------------------7--9---

---------7--8--9---------

--7--10------------------

-------------------------

This is true when you are in any dominant key. Both the dominant

scale and the blues scale will work. So now try jamming to Give

Up the Funk with the blues scale. Remember all those same things

that you used when jamming with the dominant scale, but just

play over the Blues.

Once you're comfortable jamming in both the blues scale and

the dominant scale with funk, you can switch it up in the middle

of a song. And when you're really into it you can visualize these

scales past where the finger patterns end (another finger pattern

begins where the first one ends, in case you didn't know that

already).

You can use all of these same ideas when jamming to Unfunky UFO

(in A Dominant), or any of the songs on Mothership Connection

actually, once you've figured out what key they're in. Like

I said before, almost all funk music is in a dominant key and you

can jam over it in either the dominant or the blues scale as I have

shown above. Just remember to focus on rhythm first and foremost,

relax and feel the funk.

Note: I would also advise you not to look up the tabs to a song before

you jam to it, as I find that knowing the real bass line hinders

me when I'm trying to be creative. I sometimes get stuck in a rut

playing what's on the cd instead of improvising.