Abstract
There is a profound absence of a comprehensive and systematic technical manual for the bass guitar in contemporary jazz education. The purpose of this essay is to partially fill that gap through the presentation of a new pedagogical system that can be utilized in both private and group instruction at the collegiate level. The essay contains a technical manual for jazz bass guitar that is primarily based on visual-spatial learning in the form of fingerboard diagrams. While the concept of learning via tablature has been employed in countless method books for guitar and bass since the 1940s, the guide in this essay is a comprehensive manual designed to outline harmonic patterns commonly employed in jazz and situate those patterns within the context of jazz theory. Due to the repetitive nature of intervallic relationships across the bass guitar fingerboard, a particular pattern can be repositioned anywhere in order to duplicate it at the octave or transpose it into a different key.
The material is presented in a logical order from simplest to most complex. Therefore, the manual first introduces basic intervals and then demonstrates how to construct specific chords and their respective scales and upper structures from those rudimentary elements. After introducing the harmonic material and summarizing alternate fingerings, the essay explains how these patterns can be applied to ubiquitous jazz harmonic progressions to create seamless melodies. All harmonic fragments are indicated on the fingerboard diagrams utilizing a variety of geometric shapes and colors that indicate certain chord tones in order to aid the student in familiarization and recognition of the shapes. Overall, this essay utilizes a triple-tiered learning system for the jazz bass guitar that provides students with a new systematic resource they can use to further their improvisational skills through rapid visual recognition of harmonic shapes, audiation of those patterns, and kinesthetic memorization of their spatial characteristics.