In this lesson we will be discussing another way of changing the 'feel' of a groove by messing around with snare placement, this will be similar to the Half Time and Double Time ideas and could be classed as a form of double time. It would be worth going through the two linked lessons to get an understanding of what feel is and how it can be used.
Whilst you will hear it in many different styles of music, this groove construction idea is very common in motown and old school soul/R&B music. It's key feature is the 'driving' and urgent feel the additional snares create which has a similar affect to playing double time where the tempo is made to feel faster than it is.
The hand pattern for this style of groove is quite simple, the difficulty comes when adding kicks but before worrying about that let's go over what the hands will be playing. On every numbered count you will play a snare, so with both eighth and quarter note hi hats that looks like this:
This works well with both open and closed hi hats so try both. Before moving on to the next step, ensure that you can comfortably play the hand part given above. The challenge that adding kicks will present is that there will be a lot of kicks and snares falling together, in exactly the same way discussed in our Four On The Floor groove idea. When this happens it is absolutely essential that the hands and feet strike together at exactly the same time, if they are slightly off it can make the groove sound really sloppy. So the main thing you should be focusing when working on the examples below if the accuracy of this movement. There is an exercise to help with this which you can Find Here.
A cool movement you will find in these patterns is bass drums 'splitting' the snares, which is a fancy way of saying bass drums on the '+' count. When combined with kicks on the snares, this creates some really nice sounding parts.
Below is a list of one bar groove patterns using the two hand examples above with bass drums added. These may be a little more difficult than previous level 1 grooves so take your time and don't be afraid to slow things right down.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
Example 7
Example 8
TASK
- Learn the 8 grooves given above, aim for a tempo of at least 130bpm.
- Practice switching from common, double and half time grooves to this patter, play each feel for various amounts of bars.
- Create your own version of this groove idea.
- Apply these grooves to some Structured Patterns.
