Michael Phils Music ebook

How to accompany Nigerian gospel praise on the bass guitar

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We have different musical instruments and they have their various ways of acompanying songs.

The bass guitar is like the background of the music that acts as the foundation for all other musical instruments to to rest upon.

Therefore as a bass guitarist you need to workwell with the correct timing of the song and a regular groove.

You can also check how to play Nigerian highlife praise on the piano

How do you achieve this?

1. Know the progression of the song
2. Improvise a suitable groove for the progression.

We shall take 5 Nigerian gospel praise songs to illustrate the points above:

1. Kosobabire, kosi bababire, koma solorun bire Igwe
f                       d                            s        d

Now you can see that that song written above has the progression of   fah   doh   soh   doh

That is “Igwe” by mid night crew

Now that we have written the progression below the song and we know the progression of the song well. The next thig is to improvise a very good groove from the progression. How do we do that?

1. We would pick each notes of the progression one after the other
2. We would find suitable notes that corresponds with each of the notes of the progression

Illustration:

Let us pick the first note of the progression which is “fah”, How do we know suitable notes for it?

We can know them through the chord tone.

The Major chord for “fah” is   fah lah doh

so therefore we can choose between “lah” and “doh”.

Left to me alone i would choose only “doh”

Now lets go to the next note of the progression which is doh

the major chord for “doh” is “doh mi soh”

Left to me alone I would choose only “soh” for my improvisation.

The Next note on the progression is “Soh”

The major chord for “Soh” is “soh tii reh”

I would choose “reh”

Note that you can choose your notes from the chords as you like, that is why it is called improvisation

Now let us go back to our song

Kosobabire, kosi bababire, koma solorun bire Igwe
f                       d                            s        d
(f d f)               (d s d)                 (s r s)    (d s d)

Now instead of playing the usual progression, you have more notes to play, make sure you play them in a manner by which it follows with the timing of the song. Do we understand?

You can watch the video below and above for further explanation:

The remaining songs that we talked about are also illustrated in the video.

They are

2. Have you heard what the lord has done
3. Since I was born
4. Kabi oo, O sii baba, tire ni onise iyanu
5. Ohi ooooo. Sai

Thank you. Please drop your comments below, they mean alot to us.
You can also get our ebook of chord progression of over 100 Nigerian praise and worship songs, so that you can derive your great bass lines from them.

7 COMMENTS

  1. All I need is bass line for all the songs and worship too with scales too and how to apply the scales too,I want to be a very good bass guitar player, thanks,I play but I'm not skillful, thanks

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