Creating Basslines

Any tips for creating catchy basslines?

Well firstly you dont have to produce an awesome complicated riff for it to sound good, id say the main thing is to mess around with timings, if you look at alot of well known riffs they arent that hard, just played well. For example Pink Floyd - Money, Megadeth - Peace sells.

When you progress and learn about hammer ons etc, its always good to include plenty of pull offs hammer ons, string bends, muting etc.

thanks for the advice, i know most the good bass lines are simple. I suppose im just trying to get ahead to quickly. I just play around a lot and very rarely find anything good. I quite like playing a lot of joydivision bass lines, very simple and quite different

The jam session me and Willba had on Skype earlier today is a great example. It ended up as a rather nice riff that we made up on the spot.

I started of with just playing a single note (C, third fret on the A string) on the beat to mark it and get myself into the groove of what Willba played. From there it's just a matter of what you think would fit. After laying on the beat with my lonely C for a while, I added a alide. Nothing special, I just slided from the third to the 9th fret. I then played the octave of that 9th fret twice, just to fill the gap a bit. After just playing that really simple riff for a while I started moving it around on the neck. I did te slide to the seventh or fifth fret and played the octave of those notes instead, or I just played the third fret twice, then the octave twice. I put those different variations together, and BAM. Bassloop. 3rd fret, slide to 9th fret, octave x2, 3rd fret, slide to the 7th fret, octave x2, 3rd fret, slide to 5th fret, octave x2, 3rd fret x2, octave x2. Repeat. This sounded really good when I played this and Willba played only the notes at the end of the slide. So when I played C (slide) F# F#(high) F#(high), Willba played F# F# F# F#. We did some variations with adding in the notes more times, different timing and stuff, but that's the core of what we played.

And that's basically all there is to it. I'll record the riff tomorrow and post it here so you can hear what it sounds like.

ok thanks a lot.

keithmoonsunday wrote:thanks for the advice, i know most the good bass lines are simple. I suppose im just trying to get ahead to quickly. I just play around a lot and very rarely find anything good. I quite like playing a lot of joydivision bass lines, very simple and quite different

I think playing around a lot, maybe with a specific scale in mind is the main thing. Finding what you think sounds good and then expanding on it and trying different things like sliding between notes instead of playing them normally, stuff like that.
I know what you mean about JD basslines though, one of the first things I play when I pick my bass up is From Safety to Where, one thing you can't say about Hook's basslines is that they were boring.