The groove idea discussed in this lesson adds bass drums and Accents to a straight sixteenth note Single Stroke Roll to create a really cool sounding groove. I've always known this type of groove pattern as a 'train' groove because it sounds a bit like a train... This pattern is very common in the blues and folk genres but is applicable in many other situations. This groove is actually very similar to the 16 Beat both in the hand movement and the quick feel it has. Infact this concept can just be treated as an orchestration on the 16 beat.
On this page I will be focusing on showing you the easiest form of this groove which is common time with simple level 0 kicks applied. To achieve this you will play a sixteenth note single stroke roll and accent beats two and four, both of which will fall on the right hand. The hands for this are shown below:
Before adding bass drums make sure you are comfortable with this siple hand pattern. Bass drums can be placed underneath however you like and a few examples of this are shown below. Notice that the snare drum is now written in voice 1 and the bass drum in voice 2, in the same way the 16 beat was.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
To make the accents stand out further you can also play the un-accented notes as Ghost Notes. When I notate these patterns with ghost notes I remove the brackets to prevent them from over lapping and making the noation messy. The hands for the ghosted version look like this:
Before adding kicks back in, make sure you are comfortable with the hands and have the different volume levels sorted. In the three examples below all non accented notes have been switched to ghost notes, make sure these are way quiter.
Ghosted Example 1
Ghosted Example 2
Ghosted Example 3
TASKS
- Learn the grooves above up to a tempo of at least 120bpm.
- Create your own versions of these grooves by moving the bass drums around.
- Create some 4 bar phrases using these grooves.
