music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

, alternate bass is a performance technique on many instruments where the bass alternates between two

notes Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * Notes (album), ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) sho ...

, most often the

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the sur ...

and the fifth of a triad or chord. The perfect fifth is often, but not always, played below the root, transposed down an octave creating a fourth interval. The alternation between the root note and the fifth scale degree below it creates the characteristic sound of the alternate bass. On the

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected stri ...

and

bass guitar The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass (), is the lowest-pitched member of the string family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and ...

this is accomplished with the right hand alternating between two or more strings, often the bottom two on the guitar. In the following example in the C major chord C is located on the fifth string while G is located on the adjacent sixth (lowest) string and in the F major chord F is located on the adjacent fourth string: Alternate bass lines are also used on the

double bass The double bass (), also known simply as the bass () (or #Terminology, by other names), is the largest and lowest-pitched Bow (music), bowed (or plucked) string instrument in the modern orchestra, symphony orchestra (excluding unorthodox addit ...

country music Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, ...

bluegrass music Bluegrass music is a genre of American roots music The term American folk music encompasses numerous music genres, variously known as ''traditional music'', ''traditional folk music'', ''contemporary folk music'', ''vernacular music,'' or ...

and related genres. On the

Stradella bass system The Stradella Bass System (sometimes called ''standard bass'') is a buttonboard layout equipped on the bass side of many accordions, which uses columns of buttons arranged in a circle of fifths; this places the principal major chords of a key (I, ...

commonly found on accordions, the left-hand bass-note buttons are arranged according to the

circle of fifths In music theory, the circle of fifths is a way of organizing the 12 chromatic pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths. (This is strictly true in the standard 12-tone equal temperament system — using a different system requires one interval ...

. The bass button for the fifth is directly above the bass button for the root.

See also