Thanks Mario, you're right, I don't necessarily need to be constrained to the root or 5th in order to support the flow.

For grins I built a snippet that runs 4 cycles of Asus, Asus, Asus, A; followed by 4 cycles of Bsus, Bsus, Bsus, B and then 4 cycles of the Asus phrase again. I added sax just to liven it up a bit.

For each of the sus chords I'm playing the 1-4-5 but on the non-sus chords I'm doing 3 beats of the 3rd (3 beats so that it's easily heard). For A it's a C# and for B it's a D#. And it works. This is definately supporting the tension-release.

You can learn a lot just by playing in the sandbox and I think I'm slowly learning how music works.
One "rule" for bass players might be when in doubt, break apart the chord and try the 3rd.
Good stuff !! smile

Asus Bsus Asus

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BiaB 2024 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.