In this lesson we take apart the legendary song Pride & Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughan featuring Tommy Shannon on bass.
The concept behind this lesson was to breakdown the fundamental concepts behind how to approach playing this song for my student Denny.
We are working in the key Eb here (as per the record), however SRV originally played this in E and tuned down a half step.
Denny’s band were performing this in Eb, hence I chose to leave in that key.
To play these ideas in the key of E all you need to do is shift everything up a half step (1 fret) and it will all work.
Example 1:
In this example we take a simple one bar walking descending blues bass line and move it around the chords of an Eb 12 bar blues. The intervals that make up the one bar pattern are Root, b7, 6 & 5.
Example 2:
In this example we use a two bar walking bass line pattern. This works for bars 1-8. Then the chord sequence moves at one chord change per bar between bars 9-12. For this we use the first bar of the two bar pattern.
Example 3:
In this third example bars 1-8 are identical to example two. However, bars 9-12 use the second bar of the two bar walking blues bass line to break things up.
Lesson Wrap Up
So that concludes our lesson! Keep on practicing with this exercises and find other songs where you can use these patterns to add more flavor to your jam sessions!
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