The Freelance Musician (or ‘gun for hire’):

In my mind, the freelance musician is a perfect blend of the jazz musician and the pocket player. This is the path that I had latched onto pretty early in my development, primarily because I wanted to WORK. My goals were to sound like I was playing my music, no matter what music I was playing. Bossa Nova gig? Jazz gig? Funk gig? Singer-wongwriter gig? I wanted each of those band-leaders to leave feeling like I must have grown up with that music.

It may not be entirely realistic but it’s an aspiration that keeps you motivated, growing and making a living (eventually).

Stylistic awareness in abundance, active listening skills on point, great with transcription (because you are going to have to learn a million tunes), can read with the best of them, recording session ace, you’ve explored not only the notes and rhtyhms of a style of music but the tone and touch required to make it feel right. The working professional.

Fundamentals | Scales 1 | Arpeggios/Chord Construction 1 | Reading | Transcription | Ear Training | Rhythm | Walking | Scales 2 | Arpeggios/Chord Construction 2

Fundamentals

It’s of the utmost importance that we develop a solid foundation. When you couple good practice with a strong foundation, we have the most efficient path towards realizing real growth on our instrument.

Click the button in order to download some helpful shape diagrams for the pentatonic, major and minor scales referenced in a few of these lessons.

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Scales: The Basics

A freelance musician has a deep understanding of scales, modes and chord construction. It’s a pre-requisite to meangful improvisation over chord changes as well as a deeper level of understanding with regard to stylistic approach.. We’ll dive a little deeper into this stuff later on in these lessons, but here is the more foundational side of scales and major scale harmony.

The following videos are designed to help you with both your internalization of the scale basics and how to use them but also your mindset with regard to the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of it all.

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Arpeggios and Chord Construction: The Basics

And here, we begin to explore arpeggios and, by extension, chord construction. Chords are really just scales played in 3rds (instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, we will be stacking them in 3rds. 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6 or 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, as you will come to think of them)

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Reading Notation

You don’t have to know how to read in order to play well (in any style). BUT… it makes everything easier… You can work through written exercises, notate your transcriptions, get WAY more gigs (the best way to learn, is to gig) and studying new styles, concepts or approaches at home in the shed is just more efficient if you can use written examples.

Here, you’ll find a few videos that I’ve done with regard to reading the basic ‘road map’s of chord charts or lead-sheets.

Beyond that, the only way to practice reading is to do it! It’s all about mental muscle memory and to reinforce that just takes doing and repetition.

• As this is all about reinforcing mental muscle memory, reading even 20 minutes per day will serve you FAR better than doing it in large chunks of time, but only once per week. You need to build slowly and gradually upon what you internalized yesterday, in order to grow. Reading notation is one of the more explicit ‘use it or lose it’ type skills that I’ve come across.

Beyond that, having music to read at home is the best way to practice this. Here are some book recommendations: (most are also listed on the MATERIALS page)

NOTE: There are also a ton of worksheets as well as etudes on the MATERIALS page that you should absolutely download and utilize!

And you should DEFINITELY check out the play-along page.

These are real world examples of charts (although mostly jazz gigs) that I’ve either written for people or been handed for gigs/sessions.

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Transcription:

Being a do-it-all player is as much about vocabulary as it is about time & feel. Having a deep, internal reference of grooves and approaches from those that came before goes a long way towards identifying and discovering your own approach. In order to truly understand the role and approach of a great pocket player you have to have done your homework!

Due to copyright laws, I can’t just add my favorite tunes and streaming audio of their music but I can give you a list as a launching point and provide some public YouTube videos as a launching point.

I’ll also include a list of common tunes that you’ll be expected to be familiar with on some level (if not know outright). Many of these are more common on cover/top 40 gigs but learning these classic lines are fantastic for your bass line development and groove vocabulary.

The real pro will have enough music under their belt and in their head that, even if they don’t exactly know a tune, they’ll know it enough to give a reasonable facsimile (and will often have the ‘ears’ in shape and be able to work out the lines they can hear in their heads in real time, to a degree).

Again, this is just a launching point for you. Tailor your transcriptions to your own aesthetics and genre preferences. If you want to be working pro though, don’t ignore the master song list. You don’t have to have them all on instant recall, but you should work through enough of them to have a solid vocabulary and point of reference for the respective genres and eras.

Bottom line, find the music you love and the players you’d like to emulate and start learning their bass lines, one note at a time.

Wish you had that ‘Jamerson thing’? Start learning a TON of Jamerson (by ear don’t just find the tab… find it on your fretboard by ear, repeat it, play with the album over and over. Chase the tone, feel and lines… internalize it…. THEN it begins to become vocabulary!

I could post a hundred videos from each of these players and then think of a hundred players that I missed here. Do some research and explore who played on your favorite albums… If somebody here resonates with you, do some digging and find more. I’ll just post one video from each of these world class players! Additionally, most of these players have a loooong list of credits. Google each of them and check out the versatility!

First, here are a few thoughts about how to go about transcribing tunes as well as a ‘process’ video of me transcribing Erick Coomes on “166th St.”, by the band ‘Lettuce’.

Some Players I think represent the ‘freelance Player’ well:

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Ear Training

While trancsription is a fantastic way to develop your ‘ears’ (as well as being more fun and satisfying in some ways), there are other ways to really take your development to the next level. Specifically training yourself to improve upon your relative pitch, or even develop perfect pitch (yes… you can train yourself to have perfect pitch or, at the very least, much improves relative pitch).

• Singing along with your practice. Learn to really pay attention to the sounds of the intervals. Can you play a major 3rd and then sing it back? Can you do it enough to play a note and automatically hear and sing a major 3rd above that note?

• Even just hearing a melody or bas line and singing it back is a good way to start developing your pitch recognition. Take it further by playing various intervals and singing them back to yourself.

• If you have a piano, play chords and try to identify each note of the chord with your voice.

• Play a basic triad and try to sing the available tensions of the chord (advanced mode!)

These are some examples of how you start to work on this at home.

Harmonomics • A buddy of mine (and phenomenal and versatile musician) developed an ear-training app that is a deep dive right into the serious kind of ear-training one would do at a conservatory. He uses it regularly and it shows.

This is exactly how he practices ear training (and he’s WAY better at it than I am, to be honest).

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Rhythm Module

Rhythm… I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. All the right notes in the world won’t save you if it doesn’t feel good. Rhythm is a massive part of feel, of course…

You may recognize this as the ‘Rhythm Module’. You’d be accurate.

Personally, working with rhythm like this (like a drummer) was crucial in my development of my internal time and my external time-feel. I still feel like this is one of the best ways to begin your exploration of time and time-keeping (aside from just playing music with recordings and other humans, of course. NOTHING beats that, ultimately).

downloads:

TIP: Take your time with each of these lessons (especially when things get a little more open to interpretation). As they say, “It’s not a sprint… it’s a marathon”. Slow & steady….. You’ve got all the time in the world. Just focus, listen and let your ears guide you when your brain isn’t sure what’s “right”.

Check out the apps that I used in these lessons for some great tools (bottom of the page)

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Walking Bass Module

You may not consider yourself a ‘jazz musician’ but the working freelance player ultimately winds up playing a ton of jazz or jazz related music. You’ve got to have the fundamentals of this style together and the most crucial part of that is your walking bass lines!

A bad bass solo is one thing, but if the walking lines or feel isn’t happening? Forget about it!

Download the practice charts, transcriptions and play-along audio at the bottom of the page!

TIP: Take your time with each of these lessons (especially when things get a little more open to interpretation). As they say, “It’s not a sprint… it’s a marathon”. Slow & steady….. You’ve got all the time in the world. Just focus, listen and let your ears guide you when your brain isn’t sure what’s “right”.

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Scales: Going Further

Let’s go a bit further in our exploration of scales, chord scales & modes.

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 Arpeggios and Chord Construction: Going Further

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