In this lesson you will be developing your grooves played in swing time by taking the offbeat 16th note idea applied previously in common time. See the links at the bottom of the page if you need a quick re cap on these two topics. We have previously covered a similar idea where you placed offbeat 8ths on '+' counts after the back beat snare, this time however you will be mixing things up by using the middle note of the triplet.
It is quite likely that you haven't come across the movement used in this pattern before so lets start with a quick exercise to get you comfortable with it. First of all, once occurance of the movement is shown below. The hi hat strikes will be played with the right hand as you'd expect and the snare will be with the left. The rhythm is an even '1 2 3':
The full exercise will then be this movement played through the full bar. Like this:
Spend some time getting famailiar with this movement, particularly the sticking and the dynamic difference between the ghosted snare and the hihat. Listed below are several examples of this concept applied within a groove. This will usually fall on either beat 1 or beat 3 in a common time pattern so bass drums will fall on some of the hi hat notes. Because this groove uses full triplets I have used standard notation rather than swing time short hand. Remember to start the parts slowly, make sure your note placement is accurate and then start working on increasing speed.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
Example 7
TASKS
- Learn the grooves above up to a tempo of at least 130bpm.
- Create some 4 bar phrases where this concept is applied to the groove.
- Create further variations on the given examples as well as constructing your own groove patterns.
