Bob's Basslines

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		A free online resource for the Bass player
		Why Have I made This Website?

		Welcome to Bob's Basslines, I hope you enjoy your stay and find the contents of this website useful whether you're a beginner or more experienced bass player or even if you don't play bass but are curious about what's going on underneath the screamy singers and twangy guitars....
		I started learning to play guitar in the mid 1970s when I was about 15 years old. There was no internet, no tab books and no YouTube how to play videos. I learned to play from a book called Guitar by Dan Morgan. It showed a couple of basic chord shapes and showed the chord changes for few folk songs like On Top Of Old Smokey, She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain etc. Not very rock 'n roll but it started me on a very happy journey of playing music. At the time I lived in a very small village in the Cotswolds and nobody I knew played guitar (or any instrument, apart from those in the school silver band) so there was no-one I could compare notes with (pun intended) in order to become a better player. Not long after I started, a shop opened up in the nearest town which sold Yamaha home organs and speedboat engines(!!!???) and they also had a small rack in the corner with sheet music for the hits of the day. This music was quite expensive - 25p per song which was half my week's pocket money. Yeah, I know, "we lived in a hole in't middle of road and ate cold gravel, then worked down the pit 23 hours a day for sixpence a year" etc. I wasn't good enough to listen to a song and work out how it was played so this sheet music was the only resource I had for playing modern music. The music I was buying was not what was played on the record, but a sort of piano version of the song and if the record was too long then they'd just miss sections out! Here's an example of the sort of thing you could get...


As you can see, that bassline bears no similarity to the record at all. Even worse were the books that only gave the vocal melody and very basic guitar chords...

I'd been taught recorder at school so I could read music on the treble clef (Thanks, Mrs. Tittershill) but was very shaky on rythm notation and got around that by knowing the song. Pretty soon after that I decided that I wanted to play bass, and with my Woolworths (ask your parents, kids) Kay bass guitar (£29 - a fortune in 1977!) I started trying to figure out what was being played on the records I was listening to.
Jump forward a few years and I'd moved to a town down south, formed a band with some like-minded mates, became a bit more proficient and finally joined a gigging band playing round the local pubs. One night we were in between sets and someone put Rush's album Permanent Waves on the PA. A listen to Geddy Lee's bass lines made me want to check out a bit more of this fantastic bass playing, so the next day I popped into a music shop to see if I could buy the sheet music book of the album. They didn't have Permanent Waves but they did have Hemispheres, so I got that, went and bought the record and went home to play along from the music book. The book was predictably deficient in showing the wonderful lines that Geddy was playing and there was one run that I particularly wanted to learn...

Yeah, not very exciting is it? And pitched an octave too low for the bass guitar. Now here's what he's really playing...

So I ended up transcribing the whole album. It wasn't the first album that I'd written out and certainly wouldn't be the last as you can see from this website. My memory is pretty rubbish really so if a song wasn't in the current set of the band I was in, I would forget how to play it. However, if I had the music written down I could just grab my transcript and play it immediately. So I started transcribing every song that we were playing - even the ones we were just trying out to see if they were going to work. This led to me building up a large collection of hundreds of songs which I've decided to release to the wilds of the internet for your personal use and study.
In the mid 1980s, guitar magazines became available with accurate (-ish) guitar music in them for you to learn. A big thanks to American mags like Guitar Player, Guitar School and Guitar For The Practicing Musician for leading the way. British publishers were a little slow off the starting blocks but began to spring up in the mid 80s and 90s. Also, tab books appeared in the music shops which claimed to be "Off The Record" and were note-for-note accurate.... only they weren't always right. Here's 2 bars at the end of a chorus from Led Zep's Good Times, Bad Times from their first album by the Off The Record series...

And here's what is actually played on the record...

So as you can see, just because it's in print doesn't mean it's correct. What about all those YouTube lessons and online tab sites? In my experience I've found that they're usually wrong, and the bass seems to be the poor relation of the guitar. Many basslines are just the first verse and chorus repeated throughout the song. A good balanced bassline should be basic in the first verse and chorus in order to establish the song, then they can start building on top of that with some more interesting ideas. If the person tanscribing just keeps repeating the first verse and chorus then they're going to miss the good bits later on. One thing I hate is this - "Repeat ad lib to fade". That ad lib to fade section is where there's usually lots of interesting and melodic licks and I want to be able to see them! I'm not saying that I don't have "repeat to fade" in my transcripts but when I do it's usually because there's no ad libbing involved.
I've tried to be as accurate as I can with all my transcriptions and I obviously can't guarantee that I'm 100% correct all the time, but I aim to be as good as I can get. If you notice any errors then please feel free to send me an email at corrections@bobsbasslines.com and I'll get it sorted out for you.

Everything on this website is free for personal use, education and study so please don't alter them or try to sell them. If these basslines have been of use to you and you would like to help to keep this website up and running then please consider making a donation via the little button on the bottom of the page. Thanks.


All the transcriptions on this website are free of charge to download for personal use. However, if you wish to help to keep the website up and running then you can make a donation here -

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 "Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

Why Have I made This Website?