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Joined: Mar 2005
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I'm trying to turn a song played on guitar into a song I can play on the piano. I really never learned chords and scales very well, so this makes it harder for me to convert or compose songs.


I was able to find the melody of the song I'd like to play on powertabs.net, but now I need to add bass. Can anybody give me advice on how to find the combinations that would work for the bass? I know I would have to listen to the song after that to figure it out, but if I knew the notes that worked with the melody it would make it easier.
I hope I'm making sense.

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You can begin by playing the root tones of the chords. That makes for a very simply bass line, but it is effective enough. For variation, alternate between the 5th and the root of the chord. Of course, I am assuming you know what chords to play. smile

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Above the measure it has the chord names. The first one is "E5" So then I've been looking up E5 online and figuring out which notes they are, and trying to work with them. What do you mean by the "5th" ?
Sorry, although I've been playing for awhile, I'm a begginer whe it comes to this stuff.

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E5 is a power chord, it has two tones: E (the root) and B (the 5th).

Major chords have 3 tones: the root, the 3rd and the 5th. These number refer to the positions in the major scale.

Minor chords have also 3 tones: the root, the flatted 3rd, and the 5th.

Power chords (which are often notated with the symbol "5", like your E5) only have the root and the 5th, and omit the 3rd. Handy for playing rock guitar because you only need two fingers and you don't need to worry about minor or major. But they sound boring on the piano.

So on this E5 chord you would play the E tone in the bass and possibly alternate with the B tone.

But I'm not entirely sure what it is that you want to do. If you want to play this song on the piano, then your left hand would simply play the chord and the right hand the melody line. Why do you need to worry about a bass?

It also might help if you would post the name of the song. smile

Learning scales and chords would also help. laugh

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The name of the song is "morningstar" by AFI.

This is an image of the tabs I'm working with. It's only the first 2 lines.
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/103/morningstarpy1.jpg

This is a link to the whole tab, but you have to register and download powertab software so I thought the pic above would just be better. http://www.powertabs.net/tablature.php?id=11913

and finally, a link if you want to hear the song ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnnUis4RiKg (don't have to watch the video)

I think I'm finally starting to learn a little about chords through looking them up and writing them down. I just wanted to figure out a bass to make the song sound less boring and give it more feeling. Thanks for help by the way =)


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