In these lessons you will learn about using the snare for the right hand in a groove. In this kind of groove snares are written in voice 1 and feet in voice 2. The backbeat will be indicated by two snare notes written side by side and generally all other snares are shown as ghost notes. To prevent cluttering the bracket is usually removed from the ghost notes.
The hands for a pattern like this in common time is shown below. The ghost notes will all be played with the right hand and the accented notes will be the right hand and left hand together.
Notice that on beats two and four an accent is added to clarify that those notes should stand out. Just to show why the brackets are removed in patterns like this I have re written the part again with the brackets included:
In this example there isn't much of an issue with using brackets, but if we were to have four of those bars together the brackets would start overlapping due to space issues, making the groove much harder to read. It's also hard to get a bracket on the ghost note written right beside the accented note.
Here is a half time version of this hand pattern:
And for the sake of completion a double time version:
When feet are added they are written in the second voice. A simple common time groove with the right hand on the snare would look like this:
This is a similar pattern in half time:
And finally in double time:
The way note values are used for the feet is slightly different due to the fact you aren't accounting for snares in this voice. Familiarize yourself with these simple patterns then have a look at the kick variations shown below.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
Example 7
Example 8
TASKS
- Learn the grooves above up to a tempo of at least 120bpm.
- Create some 4 bar phrases using these grooves.
