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The traditional texts on harmony typically first teach harmonizing with I-IV-V-I progression, dwelling on many technical details - mostly having to do with voice leading. This leaves one with a fairly basic bass line, like those in these examples (image source):
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While the bass line is largely "drowned" by harmonically sounding chords, when accentuated or played without tenor and alto voices, it often comes out as plain, boring or even ugly. Of course, the opportunities for bass increase quickly as one starts using inversions and seventh chords, but there seem to be few guidelines for actually writing the bass line (all I have found is that bass follows a "wavy motion", and that in IV-V sequence it moves by a second, and never by a seventh interval.)

On the other hand, counterpoint seems to provide good principles for writing a bass voice (for a novice like me the first species is already more than enough to hold on.) Thus I wonder, whether it could be a reasonable approach to compose first a bass line as a counterpoint and only later fill the middle voices with triads. This would probably mean deviating from I/VI/V - I think with II, VI and first inversions it would be enough.

Is this a valid approach? What are the possible/typical pitfalls to expect: might easily result violating the principles of the tonal harmony? Does it lead perhaps to complexities beyond a beginner's level?

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    "in IV-V sequence it moves by a second, and never by a seventh interval": you do actually see this "in the wild," although it is fairly rare.
    – phoog
    Commented Oct 18 at 10:13
  • Opinions are explicitly off topic on stack exchange. Objectively, you can use any process that works for you to compose any aspect of any kind of music. If you want to go melody -> bass -> chords, that’s valid. As is melody -> chords -> bass or bass -> melody -> chords or chords -> bass -> melody or even all three at once. Whatever works, works.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Oct 18 at 11:24
  • @ToddWilcox Thank you. I reformulated the question to make it more specific.
    – Roger V.
    Commented Oct 18 at 12:38

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In general the approach is reasonable or indeed even common; whether it is appropriate for a beginner as a pedagogical matter is another question entirely. I would suggest that you try it and see for yourself. From your question it appears that you are likely to be able to identify problems yourself; you can of course also ask for others to check your work.

One thing to keep in mind is that idiomatic bass parts typically do not resemble two-voice species counterpoint very closely; beginning in the Renaissance, well before the common practice period, motion by leap became much more prevalent in bass parts particularly. This is not to say that more stepwise bass parts are inappropriate in the common practice period -- they do exist, especially in conservative (e.g. liturgical) music, but they are rare, especially at cadences.

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