Here’s Groove Of The Week #19. Let’s see how it stacks up:
Groove of the week 19 is our first groove to feature a stack cymbal. For those not in the know, a stack cymbal is where you take 2 or more different cymbals and stack them on top of the each other to create a new sound.
The stack cymbal I used here featured a Paiste PST-8 16″ Rock Crash, a Paiste PST-5 18″ china and an 8″ Agop splash. The crash was placed upside down on the bottom of the stack, the china then fit nicely on top of it and the splash was placed upside down on top of the china.
Experiment with your own cymbals and see what sounds you can create. If you don’t have a stack, don’t worry, you can still play the groove of the week – just hit the hi-hat or ride cymbal instead of the stack.
Get The Groove
The main feature of the groove is the linear 16th note triplet between the cymbals and the bass drum that occurs on beat 3. Let’s get comfortable with the 16th note triplet pattern first.
Here’s 16th note triplets between cymbals and the bass drum. Work with a metronome at 40bpm and be sure to count and listen to how smooth your triplets are. We want nice even spacing between the notes. Have your metronome set to count either 8th notes or 16th note triplets. You can play the hands on any surface, you may find it easier to have them both on the same surface to begin with. Here I’ve notated it between 2 cymbals – the stack and the hi-hat. If you don’t have a stack you can just play your ride cymbal.
Once we have that nice and smooth, we need to be able to do a short burst on demand. Try the exercise below – play the snare on beat 4 with your Right Hand.
Did your triplets come out nice and smooth? If not slow it down until you can produce them cleanly.
Our final step is to bring in the rest of the groove. Here’s the full groove:
If you don’t have a stack, play both hands on the Hi-Hat during the triplets and play an open Hi-Hat on the “&” of 4. Alternatively play the Right hand on the Ride cymbal during the triplets and hit the bell of the Ride cymbal on the “&” of 4.
Taking It Further
I can’t think of many songs where I would use this groove as the main groove for the song. It’s more of a nice groove variation for when you want something a bit flashy. I’d probably play it at the end of a 4 bar phrase like this:
The main feature of our groove of the week is the 16th note triplets on beat 3. We can mess around with the voicing of the triplets to give us some interesting variations. Here’s a couple of ideas:
The first variation has us playing the triplet between the toms and bass drum. The second has us using the bell of the ride cymbal and the hi-hat. We’re still using the Right-Left-Kick pattern for the triplets.
We can also move the 16th note triplet pattern to beat 1:
If you’re really loving the triplet, you can extend it over two beats like this:
Note that the Right-Left-Kick pattern remains the same, we play the snare drum on beat 4 with the Right hand.
I hope you’ve enjoyed groove of the week #19. If your in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.