E Rock 'n' Roll, Mapped for the Bass

E Rock 'n' Roll runs 6 notes to the octave, laid across this seat's EADG fretboard with every E marked. A blues phrase is short and keeps coming home to one pitch; the marked notes are where it comes home to.

Major pentatonic with a b3 rubbed against the natural 3 — bright and bouncy with a bluesy smirk. Playful, swinging, and built for boogie riffs.

Heard in: Fifties rock, rockabilly, boogie-woogie, Chuck Berry-style riffs, and jump blues.

On the bass a scale supplies the notes between one chord and the next — the steps a line takes on its way to the change — far more often than it is played as a run.

Whatever scale you start from, the blues bends it: the third and the seventh get pushed flat, or somewhere between flat and natural, and that pull against the chord underneath is most of what the idiom sounds like.