Ghosted 16 Beat Variation

In this lesson you are essentially just going to be altering the orchestration of the basic 16 Beat Groove. The slightly more difficult element of this concept is that the left hands are going to be playing ghost notes whilst the right plays standard notes and the backbeat will be accented. This means a lot more control of your volume is required. Without the ghost notes the basic part for the hands looks like this:

A ghosted 16 note groove

You will be counting straight sixteenth notes throughout and those that fall on a '2' or '4' count will be accented snares played with the right hand. When the accented snare is played the right hand moves over from the hi hat to the snare. Spend some time getting comfortable with this pattern before moving on.

The hand pattern shown above will work well for groove construction but in this case I think it sounds a lot cooler if all the non accented snares are played as ghost notes. I have shown this below, the sticking and counting is exactly the same, you will just be playing all left hand notes a lot softer. Because of the amount of ghost notes within the bar, I have removed the brackets from them. This prevents bracket lines overlapping and cluttering up the notation.

A ghosted 16 note groove

Spend some time getting the dynamics of this pattern right before you start to add in bass drums. Be particularly careful around the accented snares. The left hands before and after the right hand accent should both be ghosted, it is very easy to play these louder.

The list that follows is the hand pattern above with various different kick patterns added in. This pattern also works quite nicely with the right hand moved over to the ride so I have included some of those patterns in here.


Groove Example 1

A ghosted 16 note groove


Groove Example 2

A ghosted 16 note groove


Groove Example 3

A ghosted 16 note groove


Groove Example 4

A ghosted 16 note groove


Groove Example 5

A ghosted 16 note groove


Groove Example 6

A ghosted 16 note groove


TASK

  1. Learn all exercises upto a tempo of at least 160bpm.
  2. Experiment with different kick and snare placement including common and half time.

Lessons

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