You’re My Best Friend

I recently bought Queen’s Greatest Hits 1+2 on CD for the car. The first thing that struck me was John Deacon’s inventive and lyrical bass lines. So much so that I decided to learn a few of them. Queen bass transcriptions are few and far between online and are usually pretty inaccurate so I decided to do my own. This is note for note as played on the record (including John’s cheeky overdub at bar 78).

The bass part is triplet heavy, so much so that it could be written in 12/8. However I feel the general groove is more a 4/4 with a little swing. A noteworthy feature of this line is that it doesn’t require the use of the E string, at all! John was of the few players that could play right up the neck and still have a full round bottom end. It’s worth listening carefully to the drums in this tune as a lot of the bass fills are locked right in with drums. The song’s in C so all that Cmajor pentatonic practise will pay off. Also, have fun reading the ledger lines in the chorus!

I recorded this on my Epiphone Jack Casady signature bass (with the pickup set to 250hz) straight into Logic Pro X via my Mbox 2 (No DI). I added a little compression and a EQ boost around 150hz and 1khz.

Click here to download PDF transcription