The 12-bar blues bass line, in every key.

One walking line, written for your instrument

Twelve bars of walking quarter notes, forty-eight in all: Thomas Hornig's own blues bass line, taken from his engraved sheets for horn players and checked note by note against all twelve of them. The app writes it for the instrument you play, in your written key and clef, and places it inside your instrument's range.

The chord symbols sit above the staff, each one over the beat its chord starts on, so you see which chord you are walking through. They are spelled in the key you read, so a B-flat trumpet and an E-flat alto saxophone each see the names that belong to their own part.

A jazz blues, shown here in F

Where two chords share a bar, each takes two beats. The line itself spans exactly one octave.

Slow, in one key, then through all twelve

• Set the tempo, and play along until the line is in your ear and your fingers.
• Choose Swing on the Articulation row — Staccato · Tenuto · Swing. It accents the upbeat and slurs to the next note.
• Turn on the drone, which holds the blues tonic, or play over a jazz swing or shuffle groove from the Sound room.
• Loop the line, or loop it through all twelve keys.

For jazz players this sits beside the seven modes and the ii–V–I, and the same Swing button works on the scales. The Jazz Performance Syllabus sets out what to learn by level.

F is free

The blues bass line in F is free for everyone, on every instrument. The other eleven keys, and the loop through all twelve, are in the Full Studio: one payment of $24.99, never a subscription.

A teacher can assign it in any key. It opens for the student on their own instrument, even in a key that would otherwise be in the Full Studio. How teachers assign.

One honest limit: on four narrow-range instruments — tubular bells, timpani, voice and bass recorder — a few keys cannot hold the whole octave inside the instrument's range, so some notes move by an octave to stay playable.

The blues bass line