In this lesson you will be creating Two Bar Grooves when the Groove Is In 6/8. I strongly recommend working through the two linked lessons before starting work on this topic.
As discussed in the 4/4 two bar grooves lesson, you could just play the groove twice and call it a two bar pattern. This isn't very musical though and we want some sort of pattern where variation occurs between the two bars. Ideas for this were presented for 4/4 and here you will be applying the same ideas, just in the time signature of 6/8.
In this first example the final two bar groove will be based on the 6/8 groove shown below.
Notice that the kick and snare rhythm is only made up of two dotted crotchets. To create our 2 bar pattern, we will add in an extra Quaver (Eighth Note) kick drum in the second bar, similar to how we did in our first 4/4 Two Bar Groove. In the example below we have done this on the quaver counted '3', which is the third quaver in the bar. That would give you the pattern below.
We can take this concept of varying one beat to create several versions of the same groove. Just take the extra note added in on the '3' count and move it around. For example:
So the concept here applies to grooves where a rhythm is repeated, in this the dotted crotchets, and to create a 2 bar pattern we just alter one occurrence of the repeated part.
We'll try this concept again on a similar groove. We'll start with the pattern:
Here the groove is made up of a crotchet followed by a quaver played twice, so again we have a repeated rhythm. Below are two two bar variations on this pattern where we have changed 1 occurrence of the repeated part. Note that the change can be made by either adding or removing notes.
So this is a very simple idea that quite effectively creates new groove patterns.
TASK
- Try creating more 2 bar grooves from the two starting grooves given above.
- Below are two more grooves with a repeated part. Come up with your own 2 bar versions of these
