You need to be familiar with your musical instrument. We’ve briefly described the bass guitar with the aid of a picture and little description below the image.

Bass guitar image courtesy of Bass guitar for dummies

The tuning machines are used to tune the bass guitar so that they would sound correctly.

You should know by now that without the strings of the bass guitar there is no bass guitar. This is because you won’t have anything to strike as a player.

The strap pin and end pin are used to hook the strap on(or belt) so you can hang the guitar on yourself.

The controls are used to adjust the sound settings to suit yourself.

What a qestion!!

What is a bass guitar?

A bass guitar is a stringed musical instrument with primarily four strings.
Although today we have bass guitars with five strings, even six strings. Don’t think it stops at six; there are also seven and even more stringed bass guitars.

The traditional bass guitar comes with four strings.

If you are reading this particular lesson now. Congratulations. ‘Now you are getting more professional everyday. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Today we are going to be talking about the seventh chords. These chords sound more complex than your usual triads.

The most common seventh chords we have are

Major:                                                                   1   3   5      7
Minor                                                                    1   b3  5   b7
Dominant                                                              1    3    5   b7
“Half diminished” or “minor seven flat five”       1   b3   b5   b7

Now let us look at their chord shapes on the bass guitar…it is very important.

We would be updating all these post in this bass guitar series with videos soon. Keep in touch with our youtube channel so you wont miss them.

Now that we have dealt well with major, minor and augumented chords on the bass guitar.

We are going to briefly discuss the diminished chord on the bass guitar.

Its pretty easy to play all the chords on the guitar because once you know the shape that the chord takes, you can use it anywhere on the fret board.

The diminished chord has the symbol C^o

 
In this diminished chord you will simply lower the fifth and third by half. It is unlike the Augumented chord where we raise the fifth by half.

i.e we have      1     3      5
C    E     G

the augumented chord becomes    1       b3       b5
C      Eb       Gb

Remember that in the chord shape diagram above the white circles stand as the root of the chord.

Remember we have dealt with how we can construct major and minor chords on the bass guitar. If i should select a note on the bass guitar, you should be able to produce the major and minor shape that consists of the notes(chord tones).

We are going to be dealing with the Augumented chord today. Remember that on the bass guitar when we talk about chords, it is slightly different from playing chords on the piano or rhythm guitar. To play a chord on the bass guitar, we play the notes that consist of the chord individually.

An augumented chord raises the fifth by half. It is symbolized as C+.

Now what do we mean by “raises the fifth by half”

if we have this major chord now on the key of C:      1     3     5

C     E    G

So if we raise the fifth by half we are going to have

1   3   5#
C   E   G#   which is an augumented chord. It is as simple as that.

Remember that the white circle stands as the root note of the chord.