Fancy learning bass scales? Tackling scales on the bass guitar can be very intimidating but it doesn’t have to be.
There are way too many scales in music but the truth is- you can get by just fine with just a couple of them, and that’s what most bassists do. They just learn the most common ones and use those shapes over and over. You will be surprised by just how many songs use the same scales.
I think why most beginners fear scales is because they see other players fingering bass all over the fretboard and think that’s what scales are- bass scales are actually easier than learning songs, and after you know them well, you will have a much easier time figuring out songs by ear and improvising. So, it’s a huge asset that you definitely need to incorporate into your playing.
Without making it seem harder than it already is, I would like to first show you what scales you need to master, then we’ll tackle the scale shapes one at a time. Let’s get started, shall we?
Table of Contents
The Basic Scales You Need To Master
- Pentatonic Major
- Major
- Pentatonic Minor
- Minor
- Blues scale
The scales that I have mentioned are only five- yes, these are all the scales you will need throughout the majority of your playing. You can gradually add to this knowledge and simply change a couple of the notes in between to get sick sounds, so there’s really no reason to get learning the scale patterns for these basic scales.
I know what you may be thinking- isn’t learning actual songs a way better use of your time? Probably, yes. But if you are dedicated and committed to growing on the bass and eventually want to have a fantastic understanding of the music theory involved and how you can write your own parts that sound incredible, you will certainly need to know scales. These are the building blocks to moving ahead and understanding harmony, so don’t worry!
Before we get on with the scales and fingerings, I just want to talk a bit about why you might need scales and when you will use them. Knowing the context can actually help solidify the concepts you are about to learn.
Can I Skip Scales?
Absolutely! I am not holding you at gunpoint and asking you to memorize the scale shapes I’m about to show you, but keep in mind that not learning the basic scales will only complicate your bass journey. You will eventually have to master them, and all your favorite icons already know scales (even if they say they don’t!), so you might as well get started learning the scales as early as possible.
Understand How It All Fits
Frankly, music theory was one of the first things that my teacher introduced me to back in the day. My first day in the lessons started out with a circle on a whiteboard that had notes with weird symbols like #.
The circle of fifths, basic scales involved – and memorizing what notes go into a chord has built the foundation for everything that I do these days. I am pretty good at coming up with negative harmony lines for parts but this has only been possible because I knew the scales inside and out. In a way, you could say we’ve become friends and the tedious routines of arpeggio exercises have finally clicked and lent themselves well to songwriting.
Improvising Effortlessly
For the most part, ear training and knowing how the intervals sound will be a huge asset when you eventually get around to improvising your own parts. Learning scale shapes and where each individual note is- can also help you grow as a player in short periods of time.
The more you practice scale patterns, the easier it will become for you to draw inspiration from the styles of music you listen to and play along with.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to play with backing tracks – instrumental tracks like pro players do- this also opens doors for playing with other players.
Personally, I like to play along with a looper pedal and a fuzz pedal when I’m on the guitar but on the bass, a simple looper setup will suffice. Just pick a key you want to play in – say C for example, then a simple beat that you will play along to and a groove with the bassline. Then, you can improvise on top of that to flavor it any way you would like.
As you try individual scales, you will find that each scale conveys a distinct quality- the Dorian scale is good for building mystery in your composition while the pentatonic minor with blues is a standard for pretty much every rock and blues song.
Improving Speed and Strength with Scales
The repetitive motion of scale patterns across the fingerboard can be a great exercise to build dexterity and become familiar with the entire fretboard.
Bass guitars are notorious for the larger gaps between each individual fret which makes fretting the strings harder than something like, say a guitar fretboard. If you want your fingers to stretch on the fretboard without thinking, the only way to make that happen is to practice on the neck till your fingers have the muscle memory and stretchy dexterity to form the shapes that you want.
The number of hours you put into practicing scales will directly translate into improved speed and accuracy if you practice effectively and mindfully.
Building harmony and getting started as a songwriter
I think the most important reason why you should learn to play scales- and know why each scale sounds the way it does is that knowing the different sounds of the scales and mastering ways to recreate that feeling into your own playing can make you an amazing player. In fact, that’s what every guitarist or bassist has been doing for decades- they learn parts from many different artists they like and put their own twist to it to make it sound like they’re doing something crazy and unique but really, they’re just reusing the vocabulary they learned.
What separates a mediocre solo from a good solo is the element of tension and release- and if you know the scales well, you can easily dictate the melodies to be resolving or suspenseful. Great to know as a songwriter, don’t you think?
Not every bassist is a fan of reading music, but if you decide to learn to read notations to explore the repertoire Mozart and Bach have left behind, you will be light years ahead of those who don’t know a thing about scales. You will be able to modulate and change individual notes in each composition knowing exactly what you are doing to the feel of the arrangement.
Do You Want To Master Theory?
I am a firm believer that every player should at least have a rudimentary idea of what chords fit which scale- so the band members can decide on a key and improvise without having to worry about the bassist playing in Locrian while the rest of the band is in a happy key.
Even if you don’t want to get in-depth knowledge, knowing the bare bones of scales will give you something to practice on your instrument, and over time, this will help you improve your chops and technical ability.
The best way to get good at bass is to consistently practice the building blocks till it’s second nature and improve on it. Over time, you will have gained many techniques in your arsenal, but most importantly the discipline built while practicing the scales will help you in all parts of your life.
Pentatonic Major Scale
Most players start out with the usual major scale which is super easy, but I think the easier pentatonic major deserves a mention too. Not only is it just five notes per octave, but it’s also fun to play and you can easily alter one or two notes in the scale and easily get different flavors.
What’s important to note is that the major pentatonic isn’t just an abbreviated form of the major scale but it’s a separate scale. Think of it as a pizza dough- it tastes fine on its own, but if you put some toppings on it and your favorite seasoning, it will taste even better. And honestly, the pentatonic major does sound pretty good on its own.
The pentatonic major scale is simply two notes lesser than the major scale- you are omitting out the fourth and the seventh notes, and the remaining notes are all used to play harmonies and melodies. While most scales do have some form of tension, it’s important to note that the pentatonic scale isn’t good for building tension.
In fact, it’s used mostly in oriental and calm music- Chinese and Japanese traditional music for example uses pentatonic major. It’s also considered the scale that has brought the most money to performers in the past- so it’s not rare to see bands trying to stick to the pentatonic- it just sounds wonderful.
I think the easiest way to play the pentatonic major is on the piano. If you play all the blacks on the piano, you would be playing the F# pentatonic major- now you know! It sounds wonderful, bright, happy, joyful and as if it were in metal, it would really sound like somebody was trying to pet a cat rather than the usual strangle the cat that orthodox metal sounds like. It would be a great idea to use pentatonic minor on the country and rock songs, but if you’re thinking of sad and dark songs, not so much.
In the key of E, here’s the pentatonic scale laid out on a bass fretboard.
Major Scale as Pattern
The major scale is probably one of the most overplayed scales in music but it still has its place in music as the bright and happy cousin of the major pentatonic. You will find it being used generously in kids’ music as well as happy commercials that want your money.
There’s nothing like the major scale that quite says that you are supposed to be good-natured and give all your money to the rubber sponge on your TV that’s certainly going to wash dishes, cook a meal for you and if you let it, it will even bake a cake for you!
Jokes aside, the major scale has seven notes- in the key of C, that would be C D E F G A and B or Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti in Spanish. On a piano, just play the white notes and you would be safely playing the C major scale. It’s also fairly easy to remember that the A minor scale has the same notes as that of the C major scale- so if you’re learning the C major scale, you are also learning the A minor scale simultaneously.
The root note in the C major scale would be a C- and the D would be second, and so on. If you memorize the scale, you can easily say that the chords that go into the C major scale would be a C major, D minor, E minor, F major, and so on. But wait, how did I do that?
It’s easy, really- you just have the I, IV, and V chords of the major scale as major, ii, iii, and vi minor and the vii is half-diminished. I am not going to get into chords in this post, but it’s good to know that learning the names of the notes that go into a scale can open up the path for you to know which chords fit into a particular scale.
The reason I want you to learn scales in patterns is that it will help you when you need to transpose a melody to a different key. It will be easy as cake- because you can simply play the same pattern starting from a different root note.
To start, I want to show you the A major scale starting from the sixth string fifth fret root:
Notice the red circles that represent the root- it’s the A note, and means that’s where the scale is supposed to start and end, for an octave, that is.
The pattern may seem boring but it’s super important to get used to this simple pattern before you can do anything interesting on the fretboard. Just try playing the notes loud and clear, and make sure to follow a metronome. If you’ve never used a metronome before, it’s just a device that generates beats at regular intervals. It can help you improve your sense of rhythm and increase your fretting speed as well.
After you have memorized this shape, it’s time to play this shape both ascending and descending. I like to count the notes of the scale as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, this way- I can easily memorize the patterns as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.
Try these patterns as well:
Triplets: 123 234 345 456 567 765 654 543 321
Quadruplets: 1234 2345 3456 4567 5676 6543 5432 4321
Ascending and descending: 1 121 12321 1234321 123454321 12345654321 1234567654321
Minor Pentatonic Scale
The minor pentatonic is the default scale in rock music. It’s the scale guitarists use to write solos, and it’s the scale jazz guitarists use to expand their licks chromatically.
Like the major pentatonic, the minor pentatonic is also composed of just 5 notes, but these notes are quite different from the major pentatonic. Now that you know the major scale, you can get the minor pentatonic by simply changing up a few notes- 1 b3 4 5 b7.
In the scale of C, this would be C Eb F G Bb.
You would play the minor pentatonic scale over pretty much any minor chord in the same key- and it sounds awesome.
Here’s the minor pentatonic scale on a bass fretboard:
As you can see, the red notes symbolize the root note, and if you were playing this on your bass, you would get the F pentatonic minor scale.
Just like you played the patterns for the major scale, practicing the following patterns along with a metronome is a great idea:
Ascending & Descending: 1-b3-1 1-b3-4-b3-1 1-b3-4-5-4-b3-1 1-b3-4-5-b7-5-4-b3-1
Blues Scale
Ready to play the blues?
The blues scale is a welcome scale in any musician’s playbook. It’s just the minor pentatonic plus an extra note- the blues note. It’s just the b5 note played in between the 4 and 5 notes of the minor pentatonic.
In the key of A, this would be Eb added to the A Cb D E Gb – A pentatonic minor scale.
DOn’t get carried away- the blues note sounds good, but you should sparingly use it as a passing note and not land on it. It sounds quite dissonant on the down-beats.
If you would like to try out how this scale sounds, you can follow along with this backing track:
Minor Scale
Now that we’re done with the pentatonic scales and the blues scale, let’s try our hands at the minor scale which is just a sad scale- it’s used fairly well in rock and metal, and chances are- it’s also in your popular song.
If you remember what I said about minor scales when I was talking about the major scales- every minor scale corresponds to a major scale. The A minor scale has the same notes as the C major scale, and similarly, you can find a minor scale for each major scale- which just means that you can play two scales with just the same notes.
The notes in the minor scale are 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7, and in the key of A, that would be A B C D E F and G, which is exactly the same notes as in the C major scale.
This is the A minor scale starting with the root at the sixth string fifth fret:
Just practice this scale like we’ve practiced the other scales, and you will be a scale wizard in no time at all. Here’s a backing track for you to practice in the key of A minor:
Basic Chord Theory
While knowing scales is important, and it will get you quite far in your journey, learning to use chords in conjunction is also super important.
Chords are just a bunch of notes played together. If you know the notes in a scale, you already know the chords that will fit them. Let me demonstrate this with an example. The notes in a C major scale are C D E F G A B.
Now, the basic chords that we can play in this scale are:
C E G – C major chord
D G A – D minor chord
E G B – E minor chord
F A C – F major chord
G B D – G major chord
A C E – A minor chord
B D F – B dim chord (don’t mind this)
Hopefully, you can see a pattern here- the chords have notes that are all within the scale- and in fact, if you keep adding to these chords into fancier versions, you will get notes from within the scale.
C E G B – C major7 chord
D G A C – D minor7 chord
E G B D- E minor7 chord
F A C E- F major7 chord
G B D A – G major7 chord
A C E G – A minor7 chord
If you are playing over the C maj7 chord, your best bet would be to stick to the C, E, G, and B notes as those are in the chord. Get it? The notes in the chord sound the most pleasing when played over that chord, and you can incorporate notes from within the scale to play along with that. Try that approach, and you will find yourself getting started with solos in no time.
Using A Metronome
The one thing I wish more players would start doing earlier in their playing is using a metronome- most drummers grow up with their metronomes – colloquially speaking, but I’ve seen many bass players who don’t know what a metronome is.
A metronome is just a device that makes a sound at regular intervals- Tick tick tick tick… exactly like this. Usually, the first beat is a bit louder – we call this an accent.
Another thing you should be familiar with is time signatures. The time signature that’s very common in western music is 4/4.
The beat would be counted as:
^ ^
1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 … the accent usually falls on the first beat, but the drummers can take liberties and spice up the beats so they aren’t as monotonous.
Let’s say you want to use a metronome to practice the D major scale, (I’m assuming you’ve read the above texts about the major scale) then, the notes you would be using are D E F# G A B C#.
You can simply play a note for four bars- this would be called a whole note.
^ ^ ^ ^
1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4
D | E | F# | G
As you can see, you’re simply playing a single note for four beats- if you play a single note for two beats, that would be a half note, and if you played each note for a duration of just a single beat- that would be a quarter note as there are four of these notes in each bar.
So, you can try playing quarter notes, then eighths (two notes per beat), then triplets (three notes per beat), and sixteenth (four notes per beat). Remember to set the metronome at a slow pace- around 60 bpm, and gradually increase that to what you are comfortable with.
This is going to take many months, but eventually, you will begin to notice your progress. This exercise does wonders to your internal rhythm, and you can expect to increase your hand coordination and dexterity as well.
Where Can I Find More About Scales
Online Musical Scales
If you’re looking for a clutter-free resource on the internet for scales, arpeggios, and licks, the Online Musical Scales is probably the best resource out there. It’s free, super easy to get into, and shows all the tabs (for guitarists), the staff, and even how it would be played on the piano.
Frankly, the best site for visualizing theory.
Piano World
If you’re looking for a site that shows the notes of chords on a piano, you’re in luck. The Piano World does a great job at showing how a certain chord should be played- and you can easily construct the chord on your bass after learning how each note should be played.
It’s a good exercise, in my opinion.
Practice More
Practice More isn’t the name of a site- so if you clicked, well.. that’s funny. I just meant- stop looking after more stuff, and just practice- that’s what’s going to make your skills grow, and not some affirmation that you are already good and don’t need to get better to impress. That’s crap. Try telling that to Hendrix or Slash- nothing beats practice and dedication.
With numerous sites online and thousands of courses claiming that they will turn you into the next Beethoven, it’s important to not get lost in the noise of all the material that gets presented as instructional and relevant for beginners.
If you follow the above two resources and set your mind to master that on the bass, you won’t need to go through any other courses- and you can simply get started learning songs on your bass. The key thing is consistency- and if you keep at it, you can only get better.
Final Thoughts
Thus, we have looked at the basic scales you will need to learn on your best bass guitar to become a fantastic bass player. The pentatonic major, major, pentatonic minor, minor, and blues are all super important concepts that you need to memorize and play till you can’t get them wrong.
After you’ve drilled in the shapes pretty well, then it’s time to move ahead with the arpeggios and modes, but that’s for another post. Till then, keep practicing!
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Frequently Asked Questions
What scales should I know as a beginner in bass guitar?
As a beginner, you should know the pentatonic major and minor. Don’t choose one. Learn both- and learn them in all positions while saying the individual note names.
You really don’t need to get crazy deep into modes and altered scales, but just know that they are there, and someday, try learning them. The minor, major, pentatonic, and blues scales should be fine for the most part.
Do I need to learn all the scales before I learn a song?
You certainly don’t need to know every scale before learning a song. You don’t even need to learn the pentatonic scales before you learn your first song.
Just find a good tutorial, and try learning the songs to the best of your ability. Ideally, you should choose songs well within your difficulty level and not try anything crazy like legato or tapping, but that’s really all up to you.
What are arpeggios, and do I need them in my playing?
Arpeggios are just single notes from a scale played separately. For example, the major seventh arpeggio would be 1 3 5 7- in the key of D, that would be D F# A C#.
Similarly, the minor seventh arpeggio in the scale of A minor would be A C E G. Super easy but can be great to fill in the spaces between chords being played in a song- and you can improve your improv skills by just practicing arpeggios with backing tracks.
How long does it take to get good at bass?
I think it’s got more to do with your attitude than with the time frame. Learning bass, like learning any other instrument is an arduous task that will often span a whole lifetime.
You will be able to do shows in about a year- and with good band-mates and a sheer amount of dedication and hard work, you will be a professional in 2 – 3 years. Getting amazing, however, takes many many years, and even those who are considered amazing say that they have miles to go- so it’s hard to answer how long it will take to master the instrument.