How To Master The Minor 2-5-1 Progression On Bass

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The article discusses three levels for playing the minor 2-5-1 bass progression, starting from a basic use of pentatonic scales to more advanced methods incorporating full scales and chord tones.

At a basic level, you can play the minor pentatonic scale of the home key or follow the melody of the song. This provides a simple way to play through the progression.

More advanced methods include using the full natural minor scale of the home key or modifying modes to outline the chords. You can also target notes from scales related to each chord.

How To Master The Minor

2-5-1 Progression On Bass


Level 1
The first level of playing the minor 2-5-1 progression doesn’t involve any complicated music theory
or anything like that and it’s a two-part-er.

Option 1: The simplest way of getting through the minor 2-5-1 is to simply use the minor
pentatonic of the home key. So when you see something like this:

All you have to do is play the minor pentatonic if the final chord. In this case, the final chord is an A
minor 7, so just play A minor pentatonic:
Of course, you don’t have to be trapped in this single position of the minor pentatonic. If you want
to, you can use all the notes of the pentatonic all over your bass. If you need a bit of help with
finding all the positions, check out this video:

The Pentatonic Scale For Bass: A ‘Hack’ For Memorizing And Combining Pentatonic Shapes

Option 2: If you want something else that’s guaranteed to work every time, you can never go wrong
with the melody. For example, if you were playing the song Sway, you could play the melody over
the minor 2-5-1:

Not only will this always sound good, but it will also ‘catch’ the ears of anyone listening as well as
the other people you’re playing with.

You don’t have to play the melody exactly the same way as it appears on the recording though -
you can put your own spin on it. Play with:

● Dynamics
● Phrasing
● Space
● Tone
● Rhythm
● Groove

And anything else you can think of. If you want a crash course on how to do this, check out my
video about ‘Zero-Scale’ Improvising:
"Zero-Scale" Bass Solos: How To Start Improvising On Bass [No Scales Needed]

Doing either of these things won’t necessarily outline the changes as you play through them, but
that’s fine. As long as you’re being musical, you don’t need to always be outlining the changes. We’ll
get to that soon, but as always, Level 1 is a very good place to start.
Level 2
Level 2 gets a touch more sophisticated, but it’s still very achievable. Instead of relying on the
minor pentatonic of the home key like we did in the previous level, we’re going to start using the
full scale of the home key.

In this case, that’s A minor, so we’ll use the A natural minor scale; also known as A Aeolian:
The tricky part with starting to think in terms of full scales is that it becomes very tempting to just
go up and down the scale until the cows come home, and while that’s not ‘wrong’, it’s usually not
the most musical thing to do.

When you start doing this, try to think in terms of melodies and phrases where you can. Think
about letting your improvisation breathe - just like you would if you were a singer. Instead of
getting everywhere through stepwise motion, try using some leaps.

Also notice that this won’t specifically outline the chord changes either. At this stage, your being
very general with the harmony. However, that changes when we get to:
Level 3
This is where we start to get very intentional about outlining the chords through our playing and
one of the ways to do that is to assign a scale to every chord. Where do these scales come from?

Well, a couple of different places. For the 2-chord and the 1-chord, it’s pretty straightforward - they
come from the A minor chord scale:

1-chord: Am7 - A Aeolian


2-chord: Bm7b5 - B Locrian
3-chord: CMaj7 - C Ionian
4-chord: Dm7 - D Dorian
5-chord: Em7 - E Phrygian
6-chord: FMaj7 - F Lydian
7-chord: G7 - G Mixolydian

For the 2-chord - the bm7b5 - that means we can play a B Locrian scale:
And for the 1-chord - the Am7 - we can just stick to the same old A Aeolian:

The 5-chord though is a bit of a different story. If you look at the actual progression, the 5-chord is
a dominant chord (sometimes with a b9 or #9 - sometimes labeled as ‘7alt’)

But if you check the A minor chord scale, you’ll see that the 5-chord in there is a minor 7 chord, not
a dominant:

1-chord: Am7 - A Aeolian


2-chord: Bm7b5 - B Locrian
3-chord: CMaj7 - C Ionian
4-chord: Dm7 - D Dorian
5-chord: Em7 - E Phrygian
6-chord: FMaj7 - F Lydian
7-chord: G7 - G Mixolydian

The Em7 chord in the chord scale doesn’t have the G# in it, and that’s a very important note for the
chord progression. It’s the ‘leading tone’ of the key and it’s what gives the 5-chord all it’s tension. It
needs to be in there for this progression to have the impact that it needs.
So this is where we have to get a bit creative in order to actually outline the chords. One option is
to take your E Phyrgian from the A minor chord scale - a mode that you may already know:

And to make it ‘fit’ with the chords, you can simply add the G# to it, so you end up with a
Franken-Phrygian:
Then, when it came time to play a scale over each chord, you’d end up with something like this:

Obviously, this is just an exercise. When it came to actually improvising over this progression, you
wouldn’t just go up scales like this. Practicing this though, will help you internalize the sound of
the scales and hopefully you’ll be able to hear the chords in your playing.

Another option is to consider where this chord comes from and then use material from there. This is
where things may get a little more complicated since you can actually think about the E7 chord as
coming from a number of different places, but a common one is from the A Harmonic Minor scale:
See how this scale does have the G# that’s in the E7 chord? That makes it perfect for what we need
to do. So if you started this scale on the E (essentially playing the 5th mode of the harmonic
minor), you’d have this:
This is very similar to the scale we came up with before - the only difference is that this scale is
missing the G, so there’s one less note. If you were to play this scale over the E7 chord, you’d end
up with this:

Again, this is the exercise version - I definitely encourage you to do this exercise, then quickly
transition to trying to make music with the material.

Pay attention to how the G# sounds over the E7 chord. It desperately wants to resolve up to the A in
the Am7 chord and that’s exactly what we want. Doing this, you have actually outlined the chords
using scales.

Now I wouldn’t expect you to go straight from Level 1 to Level 3 in a casual afternoon. This gets a
little hairy - especially when we get to the Level 3 stuff - but if you work through it, you can
methodically ‘level up’ your ability to play through this progression.

If you want to go even further, you can try targeting the chord tones of each chord as they pass
through and use the notes of the different modes as ‘connectors’. That’s another legit method.
Thanks so much for sticking with me to the bitter end of this guide and I hope it has helped! Good
luck with any and all minor 2-5-1 progressions you encounter in the wild, and no matter which
‘level’ you want to approach it from, remember to keep it super musical.

Good luck and happy playing!

Cheers,

Luke

https://becomeabassist.com

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