Four On The Floor

This concept is fairly popular in dicso and funk but can easily applied to any genre. When used correctly it can add a bit of extra drive to a piece of music that will make it sound great. The idea is very simple, you just played bass drums on all quarter note, hence the name 'four on the floor'. In this lesson we will show the bare essentials of the pattern with quarter and eight note hi hats then in later lessons we'll show how to add some extra flavour to it.

For this groove it is essential that you can play snares and kicks together and have it sounding really tight. We have an exercise in this previous lesson that it will be very useful to work through before working on this groove pattern.


First we'll apply it to a groove where the right hand is playing eight notes.

An four on the floor groove with eight note hi hats

See how we have a kick played on all quarter note counts. This means when you play snare on beats 2 and 4 you are playing a kick at the same time.


Next we'll switch the right hand to playing quarter notes.

An four on the floor groove with quarter note hi hats


For now that's all we'll cover. In later lessons we'll switch the hi hats around, add 16th note snares and extra kicks to create some really cool grooves.


TASK

  1. Learn the grooves above and get a feel for how the four on the floor works.

Lessons

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