7 Nation Army Bass Tab

Playing the riff is straightforward once you understand what you're actually hearing

The most common transcription of the 7 Nation Army Bass Tab found online is often wrong because it copies guitar notation without accounting for the octave effect. Jack White plays this on a guitar with a Danelectro Octave Dial pedal engaged, making a standard guitar pitch sound an octave lower. If you're playing bass, you have the actual low frequencies already, so you can ignore the upper string movements and focus on the root and fifth notes that form the backbone of the riff. E|-----------------|
A|-------3---3-----|
D|---5---5---5---5-|
G|-3---3-----------| This is the core pattern. The numbers represent frets on the adjacent strings. You're not playing all these notes simultaneously in the recording; the guitar riff weaves through them, but the bass establishes the harmonic framework. Start slow. Use a metronome at 60 BPM. Practice transitioning between the open A string and the third fret without muting the adjacent strings. Most beginners choke here because they press too hard or lift fingers lazily.

When I first learned this, I kept mishearing the middle section. The riff sounds like it moves up the neck quickly, but on bass, that movement is mostly implied by the guitar's higher strings. My actual workaround was to isolate the eighth-note pulse on the low E string. Play open E, then 3rd fret A, then 5th fret D. That's the rhythmic skeleton. Once that locked in, I could add the ornamentation later. This reduced my practice time from over an hour to about fifteen minutes per session. A counter-intuitive detail most tutorials miss: the tone is heavily dependent on your finger placement and attack. The recording has a very percussive, almost staccato bass sound because of the guitar's pickup position and the pedal's compression. On bass, if you pluck directly over the neck pickup, it sounds muddy. Move your hand toward the bridge for that sharper, more defined click that cuts through the mix. Also, lightly rest your picking hand on the strings to dampen excess resonance. The original track is tight and dry, not boomy. There's a significant limitation to this approach. This tab doesn't replicate the exact timbre of the original recording. You're capturing the notes, not the texture. If you need to match the studio version precisely for a cover band, you'll still need an octave pedal or a synth bass layer to thicken the low end. The tab works for practice, gigging, and understanding the harmony, but it's a simplification. Don't treat it as the definitive sonic blueprint.

Another practical pitfall: tempo. The song sits around 120 BPM, but the feel is deliberately slacker than that number suggests. It's not marching; it's leaning back. If you count strictly straight eighths, it will sound robotic. Listen to the record and notice how the bass drags slightly behind the kick drum. When you practice, set your metronome to half-time at 60 BPM and feel each beat as a quarter note. This helps internalize the groove better than playing at full speed from the start. The riff appears in the intro, verses, and the iconic solo section. After the verse, the pattern repeats but with slight variations in the melodic fill. For those variations, reference the guitar tab and play the higher notes on your D and G strings, but keep the low E and A strings anchored. This prevents the bass from getting lost in the arrangement during the louder parts of the song. If you run out of practice material, the next logical step is learning the bass line for "Icky Thump," which uses similar techniques but with a more driving, syncopated pattern. It builds on the same muscle memory you develop here. Transcribing it yourself by ear will take longer but deepen your understanding of how White structures riffs around simple intervals. Start with the root and fifth, then add the passing tones later.