We’re onto “Riffs – 1” (pp. 15-18), in order to play “moving bass lines”. The first couple of pages use both tablature and fretboard diagrams to illustrate a simple riff – A on the fifth fret of the E string with the first finger, E on the 7th fret of the A string with the third finger, G on the fifth fret of the D string with the first finger and A on the 7th fret of the same string, back to the third finger. After some time to practise that, the same riff is shown starting with the D (A string, fret 5) and E (A string, fret 7). Completing the section, a fully tabbed example of using the riff to play along with the 12 bar blues progression is given.

The bass I was playing the first time round was a short scale instrument and, in my gangly teenage phase, the stretch using 1 and 3 at the fifth or seventh frets was within my reach. Personally, I’d still have preferred to see the use of 1 and 4 on the fretting hand, which is how I’d normally play it today. On the positive side, it is a riff that I’ll still bust out from time to time today, particularly for blues jams where every chord is a dominant 7. I do continue to have doubts about just how good this book is as a teaching resource but there is no doubt that it has left its imprint on my playing.

After “Riffs – 1”, we come to “Riffs – 2”. In some senses, it doesn’t take us a lot further. We’re still playing almost the same riff as the last chapter over exactly the same blues progression but we do learn a couple of similar but different riffs we can use. We’re learning more about fitting riffs into a progression and how they can be varied. Almost under the radar, the suggestion is also given that you don’t have to play exactly the same riff all the way through the song and permission is given to make up your own riffs, with the sole criteria that they sound good. I’d say that both are still elements of my playing today and this is probably where I picked them up.

Marks against this chapter? There’s a misprint at the bottom of page 20 where the final riff on an E chord is shown starting on the seventh fret of the E string range than the seventh of the A string. Given that there is also text saying where it should be (we’re getting a bit of extra gloss over the basic tablature, that is definitely a mistake. That’s relatively minor although worth pencilling in a correction.

FWIW, I was doing some bass teaching recently and meeting a new student. I found myself quickly talking about simple riffs around blues progressions and using the riff from yesterday’s chapter before moving onto a variant… which turned out to be the riff from today’s chapter! This stuff is definitely deeply embedded!