Bass: the Notes a Chart Never Prints

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this reader's fretboard, roots marked throughout. A number chart is a list of chords and bar counts; everything else that happens is somebody's decision, made in real time out of a map like this one.

Two numbers side by side leave a gap, and a bass player fills it — the walk from one root to the next is invented on the spot out of these notes, and it is the loudest improvisation on the floor.

That silence is a feature. A chart that specified the notes would take an hour to write and would stop being readable at a count-off, which is the only thing it was ever for.