Minor Arpeggios – getting started

We’re continuing our beginner bass series here with an introduction to minor arpeggios.

Last week, we dug into the potentially thorny topic of chromatic scales and a few methods I’ve used to get students started with these. We’ve also recently covered:

All of these have downloadable PDF guides to go with them, and you can check out this week’s PDF with fingerings for all minor arpeggios here.

It has been a lot of fun (and long overdue!) digging into these introductory topics for the bass. I’ve got a bunch of ideas for where to go next with these deep-dive intro posts and videos, but let me know what else you’d like us to cover here!

Approaching Minor Arpeggios

Unlike chromatic scales, minor arpeggios lay out fairly neatly on the bass. For most of them, it’s possible to do a template fingering that groups the root and minor third together and the fifth and octave.

There’s really no practical way to play all of these notes in one position until you get into the thumb position region, so you’re going to be doing a fair amount of shifting and string crossing no mater what fingering you choose.

While I think it’s important to learn this template early on, I have found that most students benefit from using as many open strings as possible at first.

These open strings are a valuable pitch reference for the other notes in the scale, and they serve as insurance against accidentally sharp or flat.

Repeated Notes: How I Teach Students to Practice Arpeggios

I’ve seen a ton of students kind of “free form” their way through a session of arpeggio practice. While sometimes you want to really play things slowly and without ay sense of rhythm, I’ve found that most student benefit from having some kind of rhythmic structure for their arpeggio practice.

I’m a big fan of repeating each note of the arpeggio four times, then three times, then two times, and finally one time. This give the bow a rhythmic structure to lock into while still giving you enough time to think about the next note.

It can also help develop good shifting habits. I like to have students use the entire fourth note as a transition note to the new position. I encourage students to audibly slide during that note, landing on the new note exactly when changing from up bow to down bow.

After getting comfortable doing this, the amount of shifting time can be reduced, but I always encourage students to hear a connection between each note of the arpeggio.

Jumping blindly with the left hand doesn’t aid the bass player’s cause.

Bonus Tip: Structuring Your Practice Time

If you’re struggling to figure out what specifically to practice, and in what order, you’re not alone! Structuring your practice time is one of the most critical yet challenging aspects fo learning how to play an instrument.

Let’s just pretend that these five recent posts were your only bass study materials in the world.

This would never be all that you were practicing, but limitations can be your friend, so let’s play this scenario out.

Here’s an example six week routine that I might recommend for a beginner using just these materials, assuming that they’d be practicing six days a week, with one day off (that’s a good strategy, by the way).

Week 1

  • Do the preparatory exercises from how to bow a double bass (5-10 min)
  • One octave major scales and arpeggios: practice 2-4 keys each day.
  • Play the scale, then the arpeggio.
  • Do the beginner arpeggio fingerings.
  • Some keys are trickier than others, so you can probably get through C, G, D, and A major in one day, while keys like Gb and Db will probably take more time. (15-20 min)
  • Repeat each note as many times as you like before moving onto the next one. In general, you’ll get more benefit from practicing rhythmically than slipping and sliding around the bass, so playing each note four times is a good way to go.

Week 2

  • Same as above, but work toward developing fluency.
  • Connect the notes.
  • Work toward memorizing these patterns.
  • Stick with the beginner fingerings for the arpeggios, and work toward confidence and accuracy in all of your shifts.

Week 3

  • Same as above, but add in the relative natural minor scale and arpeggio for each corresponding major key (ex: G major / E minor).
  • This will teach you the relationship between major ad relative minor and expanded your fingerboard knowledge and mapping ability.
  • Stick with beginner arpeggio fingerings for now.

Week 4

  • Same structure as above, but add in harmonic minor scales.
  • Experiment with the template fingerings for arpeggios.
  • You can stick with the beginner fingerings for quite some time, but at this point you should be getting more confidence in your fingering abilities, so the template fingerings are a good “next level” challenge.

Week 5

  • Add in melodic minor scales.
  • At this point, you ca drop the natural minor and possibly even the harmonic minor to jus focus on melodic minor.
  • You can obviously keep the harmonic and natural minor scales in your technique routine, but at this point you’ve got quite a bit of material to chug through so you don’t necessarily need to keep in all in your routine on a daily basis.
  • You could pull back and do natural and harmonic once or twice a week.
  • In general, when I practice minor scales, I’m practicing melodic minor almost exclusively.

Week 6

  • Keep the general flow from above, but start doing some bowing variations.
  • Slur two notes, three notes, etc.
  • Practice with different rhythms. Strokin’ by Hal Robinson is a great resource for this next phase of scale development.

Final Thoughts

I’m a fan of keeping things more or less the same for a week, and then just changing one or two things for the following week. For me, this is a good blend between consistency and new material.

As you get more advanced and start playing two octave scales, I generally recommend doing a kay for each week… but more on that later!

Thanks for checking this out, and you can check out this week’s PDF with fingerings for all minor arpeggios here.

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