Walking Bass

The walking bass technique is used by the left hand to produce powerful effects in the music. You are like a bass player creating a regular forward movement by playing a series of bass notes, typically on the beat.

The walking bass is played on the lower octaves of the piano with the LH octaves handshape. Walking bass line notes include a mixture of scale tones or basic chord tones (1 3 5) or color tones as passing tones. The main idea is to play these bass tones on every beat to lead up to the next chord.

The most important thing to remember is to play the ROOT tone of the chord on the 1st beat.

For a long time, I had difficulty doing walking bass lines because of a certain way of thinking that is not conducive to playing a walking bass easily. This problem often afflicts people who rely on music scores to play their music.

When using music sheets, we count in this way:

/ 1 2 3 4 / 1 2 3 4 /


But when you play the walking bass lines, you must train yourself to hear a bar ahead, so you must think in the following way to help you think the chord 1 of the upcoming bar.


2 3 4 1 ..... 2 3 4 1


and not in :

1 2 3 4 ....... 1 2 3 4


Can you see the difference in the way of thinking?

You are not thinking of the present chord you are in, but you are thinking ahead of your target chord. After hitting the root on the 1st beat of the present chord, your ears need to hear ahead of the root tone of the next chord. Surprisingly, our ears can be trained to hear not only 1 bar, but 2 or even 8 bars ahead.

In a piece of music, you sometimes have a long note of 4 beat. You need to know the chord you are in and the chord of the next bar.

A lot of times there is no change of chord, it could be just C going to C in the key of C.

It means Chord I to Chord I.

The following video shows you what walking bass lines you can do from Chord I to Chord I.






My students like this a lot because they like to play along so I had to repeat it a few times so they get the gist of it.

But in a song, it is not always Chord I going to Chord I. Sometimes it is IV to ii. Sometimes it is V to I, which is most of the case.

The same concept applies but your head needs to be clear what your present chord is and what target chord you are going to.

Here is a video of what walking bass lines you can play in a song like Onward Christian Soldiers.





In my method book, I show you step by step in the lessons how you can walk the basslines from V to I, V going to ii, and IV to ii. They are also demonstrated in videos.

Let me know if you had benefited from this lesson.