The Cycle of Fifths for the Bass player – the Underappreciated Tool – #1 in a series of 5
You may know the Cycle of Fifths as a tool for determining key signatures, which is great. But, especially for us bass players, it holds so much more in store… the falling fifth (or ascending fourth if you will) is such a common root movement!
This is what I am talking about in this short video series: how understanding the Cycle can help you be a better bass player, practice more effectively, learn and analyze tunes, and much more. #1 introduces what the cycle sounds like and I show you a great exercise for finding notes all across the fretboard with ease.
Let me know if you have any questions. Please leave a comment how it is working for you.
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Votan Marleaux XS by Gerald Marleaux. Strings by Dean Markley
Here is the backing track to jam with. Go round and round…
The PDF is HERE
Email me a video link of you jamming to these tracks – I’d love to hear what you are doing with this material.
This video is part of a five-segment promotional mini-series I created in June 2015 for the online-education powerhouse TrueFire. Get my Truefire Course Pentatonic Playground for Bass here
For systematic and comprehensive bass learning check out my course
Thanks for watching!
Stay tuned for Part 2!
3 Replies to “The Cycle of Fifths for the Bassplayer – #1 of 5”
I think this post needs to be tagged as “Bass Bits” also. I was going through the Bass Bits and went down to the cycle #2 of 5 and was looking for #1 which couldn’t be found there. I had to open #2 in order to find the link to #1 at the bottom of that post.
Hey Chris, good point. The Cycle series is actually not a Bass Bit (Bass Bits are videos that go through concepts of the book Music Theory for the Bass Player). These are “other teaching goodies”. Thanks for pointing this out.