[nostatic]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

Even if you can only envision playing one note at a time, a handy bass approach is to see the fingerboard in triad-shaped patterns. Unlike guitar, though, it's more useful to look at the triad patterns with the root note on top. If you just do a simple bass-cliche back-and-forth on the root and the 5 below it, it's not much more work to deploy another finger and hit the 3rd on the string below the first two. And from there, it's eezy-peezy to work your way up the fingerboard doing the major and minor triads in a given key. It doesn't take very long to get to the point where your fingers know where they're going all by themselves (like they do when you play guitar chords, right?) and those single note lines across the multiple strings might start to feel like, well, arpeggios. Which are slightly-spread-out chords.

And if you want to get all fancy, play the 3rd on the one. Particularly if it is a minor chord.