Ultimate Guitar Chord Trainer: An Advanced Lesson Plan

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By now, you're up to speed. It's time to start looking at walking bass lines and chord melodies.

Walking Bass Lines
Conceptually, walking bass lines are quite simple. Here are a couple of rules to creating a simple working bass line:

1. Always play the root of the chord on the first beat of when the chord changes occur.
2. Always play a chord tone on the 1st or 3rd beat of a measure that contains one chord. If a measure contains two chords, remember to play the root of the chord when the change occurs.
3. You can always approach a chord with a non-diatonic half-step from either above or below.

Let's take a simple ii-V like Dmin7 to G7, one chord per measure. To create a simple bass line:

D, E, F,F# | G, B, D, Db | C

The fun part comes when you realize that you now know how to play inversions of those 2 chords. Try it again, but this time, whenever you play a chord tone, play the appropriate inversion on top. When you get the hang of that, try playing the inversion on top the chord tone an 8th note after you play the bass chord tone. Joe Pass was a master of this kind of technique. With some practice and done correctly, you'll sound like 2 guitars at once!

Chord Melodies
Chord melodies, unfortunately, are much harder. Generally, you play a melody, and voice appropriate chords underneath the melody. One thing that is quite difficult about learning to do this is being able to tell immediately upon looking at a melody, which chord tone a particular melody note represents and choosing an appropriate harmonization in part based on that note and in part based on a bass note. It's all quite confusing.

Fortunately, UGCT can help you in a couple of ways. For starters, check the "Reverse Hints" checkbox. As you can see (and hear), UGCT now plays the chords in reverse order, from high note to low note. In this way, you can quiz yourself about how to harmonize a given chord based on the high (or melody) note in the chord.

Once you have a handle on that, you can experiment with "shell voicings." Great chord melody players like Joe Pass use shell voicings because it reduces the number of fingers to harmonize a given melody. Better still, if you stick to roots (in a baseline), 3rds, and 7ths, you will give the illusion of a fully harmonized chord while still being able to grab melody notes in the upper voices. UGCT allows you to quiz yourself on shell voicings by giving you the option to display all or only a few chord tones in a given chord. Combine this with the "Reverse Hints" checkbox and you'll be on your way in no time.

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