I SPY… FUNK-HEAVY OCTAVE LINES

Hey there, bass players! By now, I hope you’re getting the gist of our ‘I Spy’ game, where we take a musical concept, work it out on the bass, and do our best to recognize when and where it appears on the songs we love. In this lesson, we’re going to tackle a ubiquitous technique... the octave.

The octave can very often go under the radar or be featured as the front-and-center bass-line. On many occasions, it allows us to subtly break away from the root without carrying the assertiveness of a chord tone. Other times, it appears as the main