Upright Bass: E Rock 'n' Roll Over the Changes

Where E Rock 'n' Roll lies at this seat, and what a chorus takes out of it.

E Rock 'n' Roll runs 6 notes to the octave, laid out here on EADG with every E flagged. Mid-chorus the pattern is not what you need; where the root is when the chord changes underneath you is.

Major pentatonic with a b3 rubbed against the natural 3 — bright and bouncy with a bluesy smirk. Playful, swinging, and built for boogie riffs.

Heard in: Fifties rock, rockabilly, boogie-woogie, Chuck Berry-style riffs, and jump blues.

The upright takes a chorus less often than anyone, and that is exactly why these matter: the notes between one chord root and the next come out of a scale, and a walk that lands on the wrong one is the loudest wrong note in the room.

Play it slowly against the audio until it stops being a shape, then put it over two bars of a form and let the chord tones decide which of the notes you actually keep.