Guitarrón: Scales for the Bass

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this fingerboard, roots marked throughout. A few carry most of the repertoire; the rest are for the arrangement that goes somewhere else.

The bass takes almost no melodic line, and that is precisely why these matter: the notes between one root and the next come out of a scale, and an approach that lands wrong is the loudest wrong note in the ensemble.

A written line is not a scale played straight through. It is a handful of notes taken out of one and timed to land before the sung phrase comes back — which is what a map like this is actually for.