Hello, bassists! In this issue, we’re going to talk about stealthy ways of helping to lead during a live performance— as well as subliminally guiding the listener or audience. This approach to leading can be baked into your part from the point of inception, long before you hit the stage, or it could be an adaptation you make purely for live shows. Either way, we’re looking at the use of subtle musical figures and concepts in order to signpost.
To give you an example, when creating or altering a bass part you might mark every four bars during a verse section by putting in a small fill, variation, or run at the end of it. From a band perspective, this now helps us to view the structure in phrases, and so less counting is required than if we were to count the number of bars. This example would imply that a single phrase equals four bars, marked by a variation at the end—so a 16-bar section would consist of four phrases. That’s a lot easier to count for everyone!