EP472 – fingerstyle – thumb and bass line

[Waldemar J]

Hello,

I learned the song from EP472 (fingerstyle major pentatonic blues) but in “easier” form – not playing bass line. Now I want to come back to this lesson and add bass line played with use of thumb but I am having difficulties with it.

Can you suggest any hints, excercises, whatever can help to learn it faster? Or is this rather “no shortcuts, repeat, repeat, repeat and sooner or later you will get it” stuff?

Cheers,
Waldemar

[David S]

No shortcuts, just boot camp. That’s what makes it worthwhile in the end.

[Richard G]

Hi Waldemar,
That lesson is a great one to learn and sounds as if you’ve already done half the work. Adding the bass with the thumb (always on the beat) in coordination with the melody is always tricky to start with and as David said there are no quick fixes.
What I can say is take it bar by bar and practice it “extremely slow”, to start with, making sure the melody is syncopated exactly right. All your diligence and hard work here will bring many dividends later on.

Brian demonstrates this monotonic bass style at the beginning of the lesson but it might help to analyse the Slow Walkthrough, perhaps even slowing that recording down to get the fell correctly.

There are two other monotonic bass style lessons worth checking out, EP 511 and EP 366 this latter lesson also gives an explanation of the thumb style at the start.
I have played and recorded and posted all of these lessons of which I’ve added just EP472 below.

Richard

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