Let’s spice up our hi-hats with groove of the week #37.

Groove of the week #37 is a simple groove spiced up with some 32nd note hi-hats and some accents. Let’s get to it!

Get The Groove

Let’s start by taking a look at the basic groove that we’ll be spicing up.

This is fairly simple 2-handed 16th note hi-hat groove. There’s a little bit of syncopation on the bass drum. Hopefully you can play this groove already.

Our first step to spice this groove up is to add in the 32nd note doubles. I decided to play a double stroke on the right hand every time I hit the bass drum. Here’s what that looks like:

Play this at a slow speed and focus on playing the hi-hats at an even volume. You may need to spend time working on your double strokes to get each double perfectly even.

The final step is adding in accents with the left hand. For this groove I accented the “ah” of 2 and the “e” of 3. This is a very common place to accent. To get the accents I drop my left hand lower and play the accents with the shoulder of the stick on the edge of the hi-hat. The rest of the notes are played with the tips of the stick on top of the hi-hat. Here’s the full groove:

Take It Further

Let’s take this groove further by changing up the bass drum pattern. We’ll follow the same pattern of doubling the hi-hats with every bass drum. We’ll leave the accents out for now. If you’d like another groove with hi-hat accents, try groove of the week #36.

Our first two variations are just very simple grooves with the hi-hat doubled on all the bass drums.

The third variation throws in some bass drums on the 16th notes together with left hand. However, I only double the hi-hat when the right hand and bass drum coincide – doubling the hi-hat with every bass drum would be a little too much. Try doubling the hi-hat when the left hand and bass drum hit together instead of the doubling the right hand, you might prefer that variation.

I hope you’ve enjoyed groove of the week #37. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.