- Hi, I'm Gareth Green and in this video, we're going to be thinking about how you can kind of
really mobilise a bass line. And just by getting some
movement into the bass line, kind of transform something
that could be fairly plain into something that's actually
much more interesting. So I'm going to take a few bars of the UK national anthem as our model. So here's six measures of
the UK national anthem. Okay, well, that's often
something we hear in the UK as you can imagine. And that's often how it's played, it's just kind of block chords and it's pretty kind of stately stuff, which I suppose fits with the thing. But what happens if you want to kind of
liven it up a little bit? Well, you can't really be
messing about with the melody, especially if people are actually
trying to sing this thing. But maybe, there's something you can
do with the bass line. So what can you do in order
to get that bass line moving? Well, one thing you can do is to jump to another note of the same chord. So you could look at this first chord and you could say, well, that's chord I in G major. A chord of G major. All I need to do is jump the bass line to another note of the chord. I could even just jump to another G. So instead of just playing this chord, I do this. Jump down the octave. I could jump to another note of the chord like a D or a B. That's one way of doing it. So just moving to another
note of the same chord. Or I can use these things
called inessential notes. So these inessential notes,
passing notes or passing tones, depending on how you've learnt those. Auxiliary notes or neighbour tones, depending on how you've learnt those. And they're really the essentials in kind of things you can use
to get a bass line moving. So it doesn't take too much to think, "Am I moving to
another note of the same chord "or am I using one of those two devices?" If it's a passing note or a passing tone, it's got to move by step
between two other notes. So we're going by step. Now, there's an immediate
possibility at the beginning here. Because you see you've
got G followed by E. If the bass line's moving by a third, you can easily just stick
in the note in between and do that. Because if you do that, that's a passing note or a passing tone. It's moved down by step from G. And if I put an F-sharp in there, it's moving on by step to E. So there's the possibility for writing a passing
note or a passing tone. So let's start thinking about doing some elaboration
of the bass line. As soon as you see the
bass line moving in thirds, start thinking, "Passing
notes, passing tone." So what we could do is do this. So just by turning these
into quavers or eighth notes, you see that gives me a
passing note or a passing tone. I can do the same thing here. So already that first measure, the first bar's started to wake up. Because originally it was this. Now it's going to do this. And suddenly you think, "Oh, wow! "Actually that's got a bit
of movement into the bass!" I can do the same thing a
couple of measures later, a couple of bars later. Because you see the bass
is falling in thirds again. So I could do these little
passing notes or passing tones. And so in that third measure, that's quite handy, isn't it? That's giving us a bit
of life there, isn't it? Okay, well, if I look at
the end of the first bar, the first measure, I'm going from C to D in the bass. So the trouble is those are
next door to each other. So I can't use a passing
note or a passing tone. The only one I could do, would be to use a chromatic
passing note or passing tone as a C-sharp. Now that's okay. But we've got C-natural in the tenor. And so you don't want C-sharp in the bass while you've got C-natural in the tenor. Bit of a clash, isn't it? Now could you fix that by changing the tenor note? Well, you could if you were desperate
to put a C-sharp there. You could say, "I'll
have an A in the tenor." And maybe do that. That's one way you could do it. If you don't want to make
life too complicated, one thing you could do is just jump to another harmony note,
another chord tone. So because this is an A minor chord, just moving the bass from C down to A, just means you've gone from the first inversion
of the A minor chord down to the root position. So in the first measure, we've got two passing
notes, two passing tones and then we've just hopped to another harmony note,
another chord tone. Suddenly things are mobilising
very nicely, aren't they? Now then, when we come to the second
bar, the second measure, that's a little bit more
complicated, isn't it? Because what are we going to do here? Well, there are things we could do like at the end of this measure, this bar, we could say, well, I'll
just do that trick again that we've just done at the end of the first
measure, the first bar, just move to another chord
tone, another harmony note. So instead of just using this chord before we go on there, I do this. It's kind of working quite nicely. But what do I do at the beginning
of measure two or bar two? Because that D is going to E. And furthermore, we've got this rhythm, haven't we? A dotted note followed by a short note. What can we do with that? Maybe this is an opportunity to use an auxiliary note
or a neighbour tone. Okay, let me show you what I mean by this. When you use an auxiliary
note or a neighbour tone, you start with a note that's printed. You go up one and you come back. So that's an upper auxiliary
or an upper neighbour tone. Or you go down a note and you come back, a lower auxiliary or a
lower neighbour tone. Now I'm going to suggest
we use a lower one here. Why am I suggesting that? Because this note E is
one note above this D. So if I use an upper auxiliary note here or an upper neighbour tone
and then come back to D, I'm going to go D, E, D, E, twice and it starts to sound like
emergency services on the move. So we don't want to do that, do we really? However, if I use a lower neighbour
tone or a lower auxiliary note, well, it's going to make
for a more varied routine. So how's about we do this? So I turn this into quavers
and get rid of this dot and then I turn that into quavers. So you do that. Okay? Now that probably still
doesn't sound quite right. So it's going to sound like this. That's all right, isn't it? But the reason why this second note
doesn't sound quite right, is if I use that C-natural there, it turns this chord
into a dominant seventh. It's now a V7 in its last inversion. The minute we do that, it kind of wants to resolve properly. So that's seventh in the bass, wants to resolve downwards by step. And this F-sharp needs to go up to G, which it sort of does. But it does it a note too late. So is there a way around this? Well, there is. What we can do is to
treat this is a C-sharp. So it's what we call a
chromatic lower auxiliary note or a chromatic lower neighbour tone. And that gets us away from this turning into a dominant seventh, because it becomes a D major chord, it's a kind of I in D major as well as a V in G major. We just have a hint of D
major with the C-sharp, but we don't get into having to resolve a
dominant seventh properly. And it gives us a little
bit of harmonic colour. We kind of hear, having done that, that there's a sort of sense of we've just sort of slipped into D major by using a C-sharp in the bass. But the D major chord
is chord V in G major. So when I go on to G major, well, we're back using chord I in G major. So it kind of works quite nicely. Now, can you see what we've done? We've really kind of mobilised
those first three measures, those first three bars. So what does this sound like? Okay, great! Well, we're on the move, aren't we? So now we've got to think how are we going to get
from this C to this D? Well again, we could be in that situation
that we met back here where you could think, "Well, C, D, neighbouring notes." So I can't use a passing
note or a passing tone, unless I use a chromatic one. So I could think, I'll tell you what, let's have a C-sharp in here. Now the only problem with that, is we're back with the
previous situation we met where if you have a C-sharp there, you've got C-natural in the melody. So there's going to be
a nasty little clash and we get something
called false relations. And you don't want to
meet false relations. So C-natural there, C-sharp there. Doesn't sound very good, does it? So is there something else we can do? Well, we could go to another chord tone, another harmony note. Well, it's a C major chord. So could we jump up to E? Well, I suppose we could. It's not the best solution, because then the bass
actually goes from E to D and the alto goes E to D. So you get consecutive octaves. And if we have an E there, well, that's doubling the major third, which is something we try not to do. So if we kind of energise this bass line by doing something that actually makes the
harmony worse in some way, well, we've got to ask
ourselves why we're doing that. Can we do something with the bass line that actually makes the harmony work, perhaps in an even more interesting way? Well, here's my suggestion for this that we allow the bass to drop down to A. Now then, some people would be looking at this and thinking, "Well,
what are you doing now? "Because if you make it into an A, "I thought this was supposed
to be a C major chord!" So if this is supposed
to be a C major chord, A is not in the chord. Okay, well you could say
it's a sort of C six chord. But it's not really that, is it? Because you've got A in the bass. But what's now happened to the chord? I've taken the C major chord. By adding this third in the bass, I've turned that C major chord into this kind of A minor seven chord. So I've taken chord IV in the key of G and I've turned it into II7. So in fact, it just warms up the chord. So there's the ordinary chord IV and with that A, it becomes a II7. A rather nice chord, isn't it? So we've added a bass note that's changed the harmony
for the first time. But we've kind of warmed up the harmony by taking an ordinary triad, three notes of that triad
belong to the seventh chord, that's two chords below it. So I've taken chord IV, two chords below that is chord II. So chord IV becomes chord II7. Three notes are common to chord IV and to II7. So it's a lovely smooth transition from one chord to the next. But that A in the bass
kind of warms up the chord, because we take an
ordinary diatonic chord IV and turn it into a II7. So that's a nice little touch, isn't it? Now, on we go to the next
bar, the next measure. And when you look at this, this has got the same rhythmic
challenges we met up here. So we're back in this lark again. And we're going from D to D-sharp, so that's just a semitone. So what on earth are we
going to do this time? Well, how about we kind
of take our little trick from earlier on and we use this chromatic
lower auxiliary note or lower neighbour tone and then we come back to the D. But this time, we simply move on
chromatically to D-sharp. So in fact, we get this nice semitone
movement in the bass. So when we listen to
this bar, this measure. Actually works quite nicely, doesn't it? Now, when we come to the end
of this bar, this measure, we're in this E minor chord. Well, we're back to something
we did at the beginning, aren't we? There are lots of things you could do. You could bounce to another
note of the E minor chord. But the bass is falling a third. So how's about we just
fill in the gap between? Of course, that's now going
to be a D-natural, isn't it? So that just allows us to get some movement out of the end of that measure, that bar. Onto the next bar, we've got an A minor chord
in its first inversion. Well again, I could use a chromatic
passing note or passing tone, but false relations are
back, C-natural in the tenor, no thanks. So I could just jump down to the root note of that A minor chord. And that works quite nicely, doesn't it? And then what am I going to do? I've got two D's in the bass. Oh, do you do when you've
got a repeated note? If you've got a repeated note, well, the easiest thing to
do is to use a neighbour tone or an auxiliary note. So I could go up one or I could go down one or I could go down one chromatically. I think that's probably the best solution. So I'm using a chromatic
lower auxiliary note or a chromatic lower neighbour tone. How do I get away with that C-sharp there? Well, it's anticipating again
a chord of D major, isn't it? So C-sharp belongs to D major. So even though this is the
dominant chord of G major, it's also the tonic chord of D major and that C-sharp just helps to
flag up a little bit of colour in that direction. But we're straight back
on this D major chord, which is the dominant chord of G major. And it brings us home quite
nicely at the end of the phrase. Now what are you going
to do at the end of this? I mean, you could go a bit bonkers here and you could think, "Well, I'll just come
down the scale like this "and then I'll have to turn that "into semiquavers or sixteenth notes." You could do that, but we haven't used those sixteenth notes or semiquavers anywhere else. So possibly the best thing to do here, is just leap an octave. And that works particularly well, because we're coming into a cadence here. It's a V-I cadence. And often, at a cadence, you have a bass line that goes hot cross buns. It goes dominant, dominant, tonic. So that's what we've got there. Okay. Now then, let's see how this whole
thing pieces together. I'm going to play the original thing. In other words, just the
notes printed in black. That's how King Charles
hears it many times a day. But would he prefer to hear it with this rather more exciting bass line? We'll have to ask him. Well, I think if I were the king, which is never going to happen, I prefer it with that
moving bass line, don't you? Anyway, just using this
as a model for something. Because lots of people are
able to write a melody, are able to put chords under it, but then they say, "Well, it just sounds a
bit kind of drab really. "It's just going chord, chord, chord." And sometimes, you can solve that by energising
your melody in some way. But sometimes, you just want the melody to be the melody. So can you energise
something in the lower parts? And if you want to do that, the bass line is often
the best way of doing it. So do you see what we've done there? We've either jumped to
another note of the same chord or we've jumped to another note
that makes the chord richer by slightly turning it into something else or we've used a passing
note, a passing tone or we've used an auxiliary note, otherwise known as a neighbour tone. And then we've added a bit of spice by using the odd chromatic note, just to give it a bit more colour. So I hope that's kind
of explored with you, some useful techniques that
you might be able to apply to your own writing. Well, if you've enjoyed this video, you might like to go to our website, www.mmcourses.co.uk. And if you want to know more about harmony and how to deal with the things that we've been talking about, click on courses, have a look at our advanced theory course or have a look at our
keyboard harmony course. Both of those will empower you to be able to do more of this. Lots more there while
you're on the website, www.mmcourses.co.uk
