Hi there, I’m Toru Hoshino (@jazzbassisttoru), a bass instructor.
This article breaks down a walking bass line approach over the chord changes to the jazz standard “Take the A Train.”
It’s a popular tune that comes up often at jam sessions, so it’s well worth having in your back pocket.
Contents
A Walking Bass Line Over “Take the A Train”
The line is built mostly around the low frets (roughly frets 1–7), centered on one chorus in C major. It’s a catchy line overall, but with a few deliberate twists thrown in along the way to keep things varied. Let’s look at a few of those ideas.
Using a Minor Approach Over a Major Chord
Student: “Wait — isn’t that a minor 3rd over a major chord?”
Toru: Good catch!
A C6 chord is a major chord — the same family as C or C△7 — so you’d expect the major 3rd, E, to be the “correct” note here. But in this line, I actually used the minor 3rd, E♭.
An approach like “C E E A” below would have worked just fine too:
But by deliberately landing on E♭ — a note outside the scale — for the second note, you get a brief flash of “something’s off here” tension. Then, on the third note, the line resolves down to the chord tone E:
Tension → resolution — that’s the effect this creates.
Toru: It has a bit of a bluesy flavor to it, and it works well any time you’ve got the same chord lasting two bars in a row, like here.
Using the Whole-Tone Scale Over D7
This shows up over bars 3–4, and again over bars 10–11:
Student: That’s a lot of sharps…
Toru: This is the whole-tone scale — every interval in it is a whole step.
For a D whole-tone scale, the notes are:
D E F# G# A# C
It’s a go-to approach over this particular bar of this particular tune — worth filing away for future reference.
What to Do When the Same Chord Lasts Several Bars
Section B of this tune (where the same chord lasts for several bars in a row) trips a lot of people up. A common but not-so-great approach looks like this:
Resetting to the root note at the start of every bar like this can make the line feel stuck and choppy.
Student: But doesn’t the first note of a bar have to be the root?
Toru: It depends — there are plenty of cases where it doesn’t have to be.
In this case, over the F△7 progression, I built a smooth line with a strong sense of forward motion, aiming to land cleanly on D — the first note of bar 5 of section B:
When the same chord lasts two or more bars, the first note of each bar doesn’t always have to be the root.
That’s a useful idea to keep in your back pocket.
That wraps up this breakdown.
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