Here’s this week’s groove:

This week’s groove takes a funky snare and bass pattern and adds the bell of the ride cymbal and the tom toms to provide some colour. To hear a similar groove in action, check out song “Everlasting Now” by Prince with the late, great John Blackwell on drums.

Get the Groove.

Let’s start by looking at the basic groove we’re playing here.

Play this basic groove slowly at first; use a metronome playing 8th notes or even 16th notes to help check the accuracy of your bass drum placement. Record yourself playing it, does it sound good? If you’re having trouble with the bass drum accuracy, then try playing the groove with 8th notes on the ride cymbal, like this:

Once you have the 8th note groove sounding good, then try playing one bar with 8th notes on the ride cymbal, and one bar with quarter notes on the ride cymbal. Does your bass drum sound the same on both grooves? Concentrate on not changing when the bass drum hits when switching between the two grooves.

Our final step is to add in the left hand on the tom toms. We’re playing the high tom on the “e” and “&” of 3 and the low tom on the “&” and “ah” of 4. Again work slowly on this and use a metronome.

Taking It Further

Let’s take this groove further by looking at other ways we can incorporate the tom toms into this groove.

Our first groove just has us putting the tom-toms in the spaces on beats 1 and beats 3.

The second groove has us putting the tom-toms in the spaces on beat 1 and beat 4.

The final groove just switches beats 1 & 2 of our original groove with beats 3 & 4 so the toms come at the start of the groove.

I hope you’ve enjoyed groove of the week #51. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.