It’s time to get funky with a 5 note grouping.

Watch Groove Of The Week #77 on Instagram

We’ve played around a lot with 5 note groupings with the drum fill of the week posts, but we’ve never applied them to a groove… until now.

Get The Groove

This idea came to me on a sleepless night at 2 in the morning a couple of weeks ago… what if I play a 5 note pattern between bass drum and hi-hat and then add the backbeat on the snare…. What would that sound like? Turns out it can sound pretty funky.

I quickly picked a 5 note pattern and then set to work try to play it in 4/4. Here’s the 5 note pattern I chose:

This a fairly straight forward pattern. As it’s 5/16 notes, we’ll be able to fit it into a bar of 4/4 three times – with one 16th note left over – like this:

Notice how the 5 note pattern starts again on the “e” of 2 and the “&” of 3. Play this pattern against a metronome to get used to how it feels. It might take a little while to sink in.

Our next step is to add the backbeat to make it sound like a regular groove.

The final touch I added to this groove is an open hi-hat on the “&” of 4. I made it an 8th note in length, so close the hi-hat together with the bass drum on beat 1.

Taking It Further

When playing a five sixteenth note pattern in 4/4 time, it takes 5 bars before the pattern begins again. For this week’s groove I’ve just taken the first bar of a longer 5 bar pattern and made a groove from it. So here is the whole 5 bar pattern for you to work on to expand your drumming brain. This is a fairly advanced exercise. You may want to work on this a bar at a time and slowly put them together. It might take a while….

Once you have mastered this pattern, try creating your own 5 note bass drum/hi-hat pattern and then do the same with that.

I hope you’ve enjoyed groove of the week #77. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson. Send us a message via the contact us page.