Bass in the hole…..

This week’s groove is a two bar shuffle pattern. Shuffles can be quite challenging; obtaining a consistent, confident swing feel takes time. This groove challenges the shuffle further by placing the bass drum on the middle note of the triplet. If you’re playing blues or rock, you’re probably not going to use this; but if you’re into more progressive music or jazz, then you may hear the bass drum in the middle more often.

Get The Groove

The most difficult aspect of this groove is the bass drum placement. Let’s start by playing the shuffled hi-hat with the bass drum on the second partial of each triplet. Go slow and count!

Once you’ve got that, let’s look at playing two bass drum notes – one on the second partial of the triplet and one on the third. Don’t forget to go slow and count!

Finally, lets look at playing the bass drum every other eighth note triplet partial, this will give us a quarter note triplet pattern on the bass drum.

Now lets put together elements of all three of these patterns to create the two bar pattern for this week’s groove.

Once you can play the bass drum pattern with the shuffled hi-hat, then all that remains is to add the snare drum on beats 2 & 4.

Taking It Further

Now that you can confidently place the bass drum on the second partial of the triplet while playing a shuffle, go ahead and create some more grooves with it. Here’s 3 ideas.

All three of these grooves use the previously practiced bass drum patterns. The second one also introduces the displaced quarter note triplet bass drum pattern in the second bar. I always enjoy adding that to my grooves. After playing these create some of your own.

I hope you enjoyed groove of the week #55. If you’re in Sinapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.