Simple Tom Based Grooves

In this lesson you will be building grooves using tom toms and bass drums only. This idea will be a combination of our Moving The Right Hand lesson and Moving The Left Hand lessons so if you have covered these previously this lesson will be far more straight forward. You will start on this page by learning a simple pattern with various kick drum variations. In later lessons we will discuss other ideas for variation followed as well as four bar phrases using the new ideas.

As these grooves are using toms rather than cymbals and snares they have a nice deep full sound that can be an interesting variation on the standard groove pattern. In later lessons there will be a lot of other things you can add to these basic patterns to create some really interesting and complex sound parts.

In the most basic version of the groove concept your right hand will play the floor whilst the left plays a high tom. You will then construct your groove in pretty much the same way as any other. Here is the most simple version:

A simple tom groove.

Notice that everything is written in one voice here. This is because the notes are so close together having two sets of stems may become detrimental.

Listed below are further groove examples using different bass drum patterns:


Example 1 A variation on the simple pattern.


Example 2 A variation on the simple pattern.


Example 3 A variation on the simple pattern.


Example 4 A variation on the simple pattern.


Example 5 A variation on the simple pattern.


TASK

  1. Learn all given examples up to a tempo of at least 120bpm.
  2. Use these grooves as the 'A' or 'B' section of a Phrased Pattern.

Lessons

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