Cool. More will come to me as I think on it some more …
“Walk on the Wild Side”, Lou Reed
“Still Loving You”, The Scorpions
“Something”, The Beatles
“When I Need You”, Leo Sayer
“Every Time You Go Away”, Paul Young
“Heart to Heart”, Kenny Loggins
“If You Leave Me Now”, Chicago
If you could figure out “Money” from scratch, I’m confident you could do the same with “Black Magic Woman.” Knowing it to be a 12-bar is half the battle won.
I recommend Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive.” It’s a fast one, but nothing to fear. It’s basically just a descending chromatic scale.
Do you listen to any Motown? James Jamerson and Wilton Felder were as good as it gets. You can easily google isolated bass tracks for both of them. If you aren’t having fun playing ABC or I Want You Back, you need to find another instrument! (JMO! ;))
Is it that physically playing the parts is too difficult, or that you can’t figure out the correct notes to play? If it’s the second, there’s no reason not to look up bass tabs on line or watch ‘how to play the bass part for song X’ videos on Youtube. If it’s the first, my advice is to get a metronome program for your phone, and practice playing it half-speed, then gradually speeding up.
I think Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” is a tremendous bass line – a little bit of everything (run-ups before the beat, single notes on the beat (at one point transforming to eighth notes filling in), descending bass line, even dropping out for a while, combined with a killer instantly-recognizable hook).
LOL. I was this close to recommending that guy’s youtube channel to Ritter. There’s a bunch of tougher stuff on there than what you’re looking for—as already pointed out, Rio; Freewill; a few from Primus; and a bunch from the Chilis—but there are some other bass lines he plays that don’t look as ridiculous as the above. He does “I Want You Back”, as already suggested by Dinsdale, and the search for that song is how I found the guy in the first place.
I can’t play. But his videos are so well done, with clear, easy to read tabs, that I think I can.
If you have either an iPad, iPhone, or a Mac, you can use this software. It’s more convenient on the Mac, and it’s definitely easier to see on an iPad than an iPhone, but it still works very well for all of these platforms.
Capo was designed for guitar, but works just as well for bass.
With it, I do the following with zero effort:
Change speed without affecting pitch. I slow it down to 50% and the notes are all still the same, just stretched out.
Change key. If the song is in C but our singer finds it’s too high, I can drop the tune down to Bb and practice it that way, getting ready for when we really play it in Bb.
Fine tune pitch. This is great for songs that are out of tune slightly.
Identify chords. The software makes a pretty good guess and labels the chords.
With a little bit of effort you can separate the notes
You can listen to a narrow band of frequencies or a narrow spatial window in the “stereo sound” space.
The software displays a spectrum analyzer that gives a pretty rough idea of what the notes are. Overtones muddy the water, but it’s a pretty good start for identifying troublesome notes in a riff.
Between the ability to slow down dramatically while amping up the bass/mids and looking at the visual display, I use it daily for transcribing as well as practice.
I used keyboard macro software to set up MIDI controller actions to control this software, so I just twist a knob on a controller to pan through the song.
Ooof, right in the yarbles. It’s nothing like Revolution 9, other than it’s not a standard song structure. Listen again. If not a melody, there’s certainly a motif. To emphasize the contrast with Revolution 9, it may as well have been done in one take. That guitar part is hard in its own way, and I’ve seen more than one person play a semblance of it live, and heard at least one early live version from Floyd that dwarfs the one on record.
It might not be your thing, but everything can’t be effectively summed up by a comparison to a Beatles song.
And yeah, jamming your way through a long freakout may not be what you meant by easy parts. Getting back into a groove smoothly out of one can be difficult.
Yeah, I was able to learn that one reasonably well in a week for a cover band at work. It’s not hard.
If you don’t have a Zeppelin aversion, John Paul Jones is reasonably easy and a quite tasteful bass player.
Ah, you whippersnappers w/ your apps and devices. Conjured up memories of trying to drop the needle correctly to figure out the various instrumentation - not to mention lyrics… Still not sure what the hell Peter Gabriel was singing about on Modern Love! :smack:
Re: on-line tabs and such, be very wary about those. I wanted to work up Tom Waits’ Come on Up to the House. First looked on-line for words and chords and printed a few off. Not a single one had it as I heard it when I tried to work it out. Didn’t even get the key right (Eb - to my ear.) Of course, after figuring out what key I could SING it in (turned out to be A), I decided with the folk I would be playing it with I preferred a different bass line and feel. (IMO not much would be stupider than trying to imitate TW!)
On edit, Beatles songs featuring the 2d Paul McCartney have some tasteful lines. Make clear why they killed the 1st Paul off!
I’m trying to balance out my usage of the tools that are available with real old-school: I have been making a concerted effort to hand-write my transcriptions of full songs in standard musical notation on bound music staff paper.
It’s an enjoyable exercise because there are all kinds of nuances to musical notation that one never imagines until actually having to write it, such as rules for stem direction and grouping and so on. I go to my wife (a classically trained pianist who studied this stuff at conservatory) and she explains it.
Aside from the notation aspect, it forces me to accurately break down the various bass rhythms encountered and helps my sight reading.
I don’t see ever being able to do this work in ink though.