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:

In this lesson we’ll begin to look at how to create the illusion of two independent parts using a walking bass line punctuated with occasional short chord stabs above. The focus here is on controlling the duration of the notes with the right hand, in order to create parts that contrast with one another. The examples in this lesson use the first two bars of the C Blues bass line from Walking Bass Line Lesson 3. Once you have these two rhythms under your fingers try applying them to the rest of the blues progression or any other tune you’re working on.