All other groove concepts covered for common time grooves can apply to half time. So we can move the right hand around the kit, add in crashes and open hi hats. All of these are pretty straight forward to apply, on this page we will quickly look at creating two bar versions of these grooves.
The rules for the concept that applied to our common time grooves can apply here, we want to create a pattern that is two bars long where the second bar has something slightly different going on. What I am going to do on this sheet is use some of the grooves from our groove introduction series and translate them into half time. If you have a quick look back at these grooves you will notice that in the majority of examples the two halfs of the bar are different, meaning we can create some nice two bar half time grooves based on these patterns. When doing this we only need to change the kick and snare part, you can pick whether you want quavers or crotchets on the hi hat.
As an example we'll start with this groove:
In this groove the two halfs of the bar are different. In the first half we play one quarter note kick followed by two eight note kicks in the second half. To turn this into half time we are going to double the note values of the kick and snare. So where we had crotchets we will have minims and where we had quavers we'll have crotchets. With eight notes on the hi hat that gives us this:
And if we change the right hand to crotchets we have this:
Let's try another example. We'll start with this basic groove pattern:
Then we'll extend it over two bars and double our kick and snare note values to give us this:
And with the right hand as crotchets we have this:
TASK
- Learn the 2 grooves given above, aim for a tempo of 130bpm.
- Go through the rest of the introductory grooves and try changing them to half time.
We can also use the concept of just adding in an extra note to the second bar. Below are a few examples of this.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
TASK
- Learn grooves given above, aim for a tempo of 130bpm.
- Practice switching from a two bar common time groove to a two bar half time groove, play each feel for various amounts of bars.
- Create your own two bar half time groove patterns.
- Apply half grooves to some Structured Patterns.
