How to Get Big Sounds from Little Steps | Part 2

In our last article "How to Get Big Sounds from Little Steps | Part 1", we looked at a concept called "Step Wise Descending Bass". The descending bass notes were all diatonic, meaning that they all existed within the key we were playing in (C Major).

In this article, I want to look at the same concept but I would like to showcase some don-diatonic tones to use in our descending bass line. As I stated in the last article, the bass line is moving down (descending).

It will be descending in a combination of half steps and whole steps just as before but will include some tones that are non-diatonic, meaning they don't exist in the key (in this example, C Major). We're also using extended chords to demonstrate our progression with.

You can view the basic descending bass line in the last article here.

Here's our new chord sequence in C Major with our descending bass line.
(C | G/B | Bb | F/A | Fm/Ab | C/G | D7/F# | G7 |

We'll start out with the same two chords as we did in part 1.

Our first chord is C Major with the same voicing as in part 1 of this article.

Again,the G Major chord has a B in the bass which is the Major 3rd of G. This is known a slash chord and can be referred to as an inversion of a G Major chord.

Our next chord is going to be a non-diatonic chord, B flat Major.The fourth chord in our descending chord progression is the same in our last example, F over A. You'll remember that it's also a slash chord.It's starts to get more interesting as we descend down to our next chord. Here, we have an F minor chord over A flat. This chord is not a diatonic chord in the key of C Major but is a parallel minor chord of C Major. In other words, the F minor chord is diatonic in the key of C minor. It's also constructed under the same concept of voicing a chord over its 3rd which is of course minor 3rd.

We're now down to the 6th tone and playing a C Major chord over G. This is similar to playing a chord over the 3rd but you're playing the 5th instead. Our next tone in our descending bass line will include the 2 chord but instead of playing the root in our bass line, we'll place the 3rd in the bass instead. Notice that it's also a dominant 7th chord.   We're also omitting the 5th of the chord to make it more interesting.

I mentioned in part 1 of this article that the D7 chord has a strong tendency to move to the G chord which is the 5 chord in the key of C Major. So we'll play a G7 chord.
Of course this leads us back home to our starting chord of C Major.