The Octave
| January, 2006
It’s hard to imagine, but nearly all Western music was, is, and will be composed using the same 12 notes, tuned to the same basic pitches, obeying the same fundamental rules of consonance and dissonance. From Mozart to Metallica, music’s elegant vastness is the result of 12 ever-present ingredients, mashed and molded with infinite variety. Slowly realizing this basic fact, spiritual in its profundity, is one of the most beautiful parts of becoming a bass player. As hard-working beginners, our minds steadily illuminate, awakening to the fingerboard’s patterns, hearing and feeling our instrument’s cosmically deep potential.
My journey began with the octave. Until I recognized its potential, the bass’s fingerboard was an arcane peg-game board, randomly dotted and divided. But discovering octave patterns was like getting that game’s rulebook: Suddenly, I perceived the fingerboard’s wondrous economy, the visual repetition at the core of bass technique. This perception was the seed of everything I’ve since learned.
An octave is an interval that represents the distance of eight diatonic degrees between two notes of the same name. When played consecutively, notes an octave apart sound similar, only lower or higher in pitch. To see the octave’s potential, it’s essential to appreciate that notes an octave apart are the same note—so any pattern played in one position on the bass can be exactly duplicated in a different range by beginning on the note an octave above or below. Fig. 1 shows every appearance of the note G on a 21-fret, 4-string fingerboard. To play the riff in Ex. 1, use one of the blue note locations from Fig. 2; I’ve also shown the riff in a few other locations with red dots.
The bass’s pattern penchant is bittersweet. Reinforced by position markers, our tendency to favor symmetry can rule our visual interpretation of the fingerboard. We’ll play certain licks just because they follow a geometrically logical pattern, despite the musical consequences. Ideally, we should think of each note on the fingerboard as having equal priority; bass lines and licks that fall into shapes merely do so through coincidental convenience. But as beginners, understanding the fingerboard is our main path, and the octave and its patterns are step one.
