It’s late and right now I am trying to write band parts for Zombie Wedding, which I’m flying out to help with rehearsals for in a few days. Eek. And if that wasn’t eek enough, we have a band. A four piece band. Thats drums, keys, bass and lead. I have to write the parts for that band. For that four part band. How well will I do? Find out in this *essay*. I will update it as and when I get more information and try and make this as concise a piece about writing for band parts as it can be.

before we start I will introduce the nature of my instrumentation for this particular job. I am not necessarily writing full instrumental parts. This is a fringe production and there will not be the time for the musicians to learn (that’s right, pit musicians learn as well as read) concise instrument parts. To that end I am writing band parts that are as bare as possible while still keeping that music as close to the piano score.

So let’s start with bass, this should be easy I suppose. Fortunately I tend to write bass-lines in my piano parts anyway so that’s just a case of copy-and-pasting piano bass parts into the Bass cleff (*bass* and *Bass*?). Then its just a case of making sure the notes never go below bottom E (E1).

If you don’t tend to write Bass parts or have them in mind then consider that the Bass is where the song gets its rhythmic foundation. While its true that drums keep the rhythm, drummers like to break into half beats and do clever stuff, and the lead guitar will tend to play against the rhythm. So keep the Bass the most steady instrument in the song in terms of rhythm. Unless it’s exactly EXACTLY what you are after, do not experiment with the Bass by giving it melodic phrases or deviating from the root or 3rd of the chord outside of passing notes. I make a distinction between riffs and melodic phrases here.

Keep in mind that the Bass is a transposing instrument, sounding one octave lower than read. Transposing instruments that sound an octave above or below what is read are in my opinion the best type of transposing instrument. I’m writing rock so I will be using the low register of the bass pretty much all the time, but for some music is would be inappropriate to use such low notes so if you are just cut-and-pasting the bass parts consider putting it up an octave. The Bass’ high register is one of my favorite voices. Love it. And Bass harmonics? Oh forget about it.

The ZW score is authentic 80s pop music so the Bass is clean throughout, with occasional chorus and reverb in ballads and slap for the angry songs. When there are times in the score where you imagine the Bassist might come up with something more natural and Bassy than you can, say for example, blue runs or general a funky fill, then its acceptable to put a text note and leave the chords. As a matter of fact is wouldn’t be a bad idea to give the bassists all the chords in text form anyway. They like to know what’s going on.

So in summation

• Bass is an octave-down transposing instrument
• Bass carried the rhythm so keep it steady
• Bass sounds good high
• Range is E1 all the way up into the squeaky 6s
• Give Basses chords
• Bassists can come up with *Bassy* stuff better than you can