The Inner City Life held sub

Hold the key’s root, low, for two whole bars and do not touch it. Everything above the bass is moving at this tempo, and the bass is the one thing that is not.

Move to the key’s sixth on the head of bar three, a minor sixth up, and hold it for the bar. One move, one note, and nothing pushing into it.

Bar four is the key’s fifth, a semitone down, held for three beats. The chord over it is the major V, with the raised seventh of the key in it as its third, and the bass plays the root and leaves that third to the chord. Do not flatten the chord to fit the bass.

Let the fifth go at the end of beat three and leave the next two sixteenths empty. Then, in the last two sixteenths of the bar, the key’s seventh and sixth, straight down into the root on the head of the next pass. The gap is what makes the pickup land, and those two notes are the only movement in four bars.

Roots only until the pickup. The root of the i, of the VI and of the V, each under its own chord, and nothing else for fifteen beats. The tension is all in the chords and the drums, and the bass is the floor they stand on.

Keep every note clean and let it ring to its full length. Three bars of nothing and one bar of everything is the whole figure; a sub that moves more than this is a bass line.