Here’s a bit of linear fun with the week’s groove.

The hi-hat firmly takes centre stage in this week’s groove. We’ve got some 32nd notes, some accents and a 6 stroke roll to get through. Let’s take a look at how the hi-hat can bring a groove to life.

Get The Groove

Let’s build this groove up one beat at a time. Here’s the first beat:

If you’re not comfortable with 32nd notes, play this very slowly – 40bpm – against a metronome counting 16th notes. Focus on getting the RRL on “e & ah” accurate and then slot the 32nd note left hand between them. Finally focus on getting the accent on the hi-hat on the “ah”.

Let’s look at beat two:

Beat two has us play a simple “2 &ah” again, focus on rhythmic accuracy and the accent on the “ah” of 2.

Let’s add beat 3:

We’re actually resting on beat 3 and playing the “e & ah” of three. Again, use a metronome, take it slow, focus on accuracy and getting the accent on the “&” with the left hand.

It’s time for beat 4:

The fourth beat is a simple “4 &ah”. Again focus on rhythmic accuracy and getting the accent on the “ah” of 4 with the left hand.

For the 2nd bar of the this groove, beats 1 to 3 remain the same. You can practice this already:

For the final beat, I played around a lot with ideas for this but I finally settled on a 6-stroke roll played through 16th note triplets with an accent on the last note. If you have trouble with this roll, look at the “Take It Further” section for additional ideas.

Take It Further

As mentioned previously, I played around with a lot of ideas for the final beat 4, Here’s some of the others.

Our first variation has simple 16th notes on the end with an accent on the last 16th note.

The second variation uses 8th note triplets with accents on both the addition notes.

The third and fourth variations both use 16th note triplets. The third variation has an accent on the “&”. You can play these triplets RLRLRL or RLLRLL. For the fourth variation we accent the last 3 16th note triplets, I’d suggest RLRLRL sticking to play this pattern.

The final variation just copies the 32nd note pattern from beat 1 – except we’re hitting the snare drum on the beat and note the bass drum.

The idea behind this groove was to take a simple, sparse, snare and bass drum pattern and to spice it up with hi-hats. I suggest you pick a sparse pattern you like and try to do the same.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this groove of the week. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like drum lessons, send us a message via our contact us page.