Walking Bass Lines is a free weekly video guitar lesson series covering great rhythm progressions for jazz, blues, or swing guitar. Your instructor is John Horne, who is working on a new TrueFire online classroom. Stay tuned for more and be sure to subscribe!

Video Guitar Lesson:

Chart & Tab:


Walking a bass line is an important skill to have when comping for other instrumentalists. This video lesson is an introduction to understanding how you can create simple walking bass lines on the fly using diatonic and chromatic approach notes. We’ll use a two-bar IM7 VI7 ii7 V7 progression in the key of C as our harmonic foundation for this lesson. This progression is often used as a turnaround figure and is found in hundreds of standard jazz and blues songs. It is also a central element in “rhythm changes”- a common song form that utilizes the chord changes to George Gerswin’s “I Got Rhythm.”

Walking Bass Lines is a free weekly video guitar lesson series covering great rhythm progressions for jazz, blues, or swing guitar. Your instructor is John Horne, who is working on a new TrueFire online classroom. Stay tuned for more and be sure to subscribe!