It’s time to evolve. It’s time for Groove Of The Week #30.

Groove of the week #30 is the evolved version of Groove of the week #29. After recording Groove of the week #29, I sat around and played with the groove some more, and I thought, what would happen if I played the hi-hats starting with the left hand? Well, it presented a new challenge, just getting the groove working again took a few minutes.

Once I had the groove working I thought, what can I do differently now? It occurred to me that the Right hand was now playing the offbeats, so I started by accenting it on the hi-hat and then moving the accents to different surfaces. Finally, I settled on either the cowbell or the stack cymbal as my favourite surface, but I couldn’t decide, so I created this 2 bar groove to accommodate them both.

Learn The Groove

The first step in learning this groove is to go and learn Groove of the week #29. Once you’ve done that, let’s take groove of the week #29 and change the hands to LRLRLR instead of RLRLRL:

Take your time getting this groove; if you’ve never played grooves starting with your left hand, this will feel very strange. Take it as slow as you need. It may take you some time to get this happening. Note that you may need to move your right hand out of the way slightly when the left hand crosses under to play the snare.

Once you are comfortable playing groove of the week #29 left handed, then we extend the groove and change it to get the 2 bar pattern we’ll be using for groove of the week #30

The final step is to move the Right hand around on the “&” of each beat. You can start by accenting the hi-hat on the “&” of each beat. If you don’t have a cowbell or a stack cymbal, try another effects cymbal (splash or china) or the ride cymbal. Here’s the full groove as I played it.

Taking It Further

As with groove of the week #29, the best way to take this further is to try adding fills. The challenge here is leading the fills with the left hand and being comfortable crashing on beat 1 after the fill with your left hand. All the fills here are played LRLRLR etc…

You’ll notice that the second and fourth fill keep the stack cymbal happening on the “&”s to help keep the feel of the groove. .

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 on the contact us page.