Half time funk shuffle - 01

Here's a page for my students, working through the basics of a half time funk shuffle groove. It gets mentioned a lot more online than it comes up in real life, but it's a thing.

There are a number of ways to write it; I've put it in 6/8 and 12/8. In real life I might expect it to come up most often as a sixtuplet feel in 4/4.  

Pay careful attention to the dynamics on the snare drum; play the accent strongly and ghost the other notes. I also accent the downbeats of the cymbal rhythm, you can do that if you choose. 

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Half time country rock with Reed

This swingy country, folky, gospel type of half time feel groove is all over the music of the late 60s/early 70s. You Can't Always Get What You Want, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, for example. It happens on a couple of tunes I was working on for a show with my wife, Casey Scott, on Friday, and I realized I wasn't very good at it. At least in the practice room, at the tempo of that song— in the show it worked out fine. 

But let's talk about a strategy for working on that— it requires some creativity and interpretation on your part. 

We're in a half time feel, so when reading out of Syncopation, the backbeat will fall on beat 3. The 8th notes will swing in a legato way, which will give it a feel not unlike a sixtuplet funk shuffle, though different. Don't overdo the swing feel.

For the grooves, use lines 1, 3, 4, 13-18, 42-43, 46-47 from pp. 34-36 of Syncopation. Play most of the book rhythm on the bass drum, except put beat 3 (not the &) on the snare drum. Play quarter notes on the cymbal.  Get out your four color pen and circle those lines in green or whatever. Note that all of those lines have notes sounding on beats 1 and 3. 

Basically do this, except play quarter notes on the cymbal instead of 8th notes:

To simplify the bass drum and add some interaction with the snare, play line 4, alternating notes between bass drum and snare drum:

That 8th-quarter-8th rhythm happens a lot— when it happens on beat 1, start with the bass drum; when it happens on beat 3, start with the snare, so lines 1 and 3 would be played:

You can then voice the other groove rhythms similarly— start and end on the bass drum on beats 1-2, start and end on the snare drum with beats 3-4:  

For the fills, you can use any of the book rhythms, played down the drums, with whatever sticking you like: 

You don't always have to go high to low— improvise the moves around the drums and see what else is effective. 

If the book rhythm has a rest on 1, play the cymbal or cymbal/bass drum there just to mark it: 

You could play quarter notes on the bass drum through the fill, to nail down the time. Especially on the sparser rhythms. If you watch the Dixie video linked to at the top of the post, you'll notice that Levon Helm played this type of groove with four on the floor bass drum all the way: 

This is the phrase I was practicing, from a particular song— but it's universal enough: 

Improvise the groove portion, and get the fill rhythms out of the book, and focus on the timing. For me the big problem was laying back enough. The vocabulary isn't necessarily new; this is more a template for refining it and nailing down the proper phrasing. 

EZ cut time funk method

Here's an easy cut time funk technical study, sort of a flanker for my basic method, serving really no purpose except to set up a situation where unexpected things can happen. It's easy to get locked into your normal way of playing, so what we'll do here is disrupt that a little bit, playing some ordinary-sounding grooves in a non-ordinary way. It's challenging enough to introduce something new, but easy enough that you won't have to dedicate a ton of time to something of questionable direct utility. It hints at the open-handed thing, without going full-on “I'm going to mindlessly do everything backwards in the name of an idea”, which I hate.

You recall the foundation groove from my basic two-handed method, with the hihat and snare played with the right hand only:

What we'll do is play that groove, and a variety of others, with a mixed sticking derived from pp. 8-9 of Syncopation by Ted Reed (Lesson 3, in the new edition)— the section with the linear quarter notes. We'll interpret those exercises as stickings: stems down = left hand, stems up = right hand. So line 6, for example:

You can get the stickings from anywhere, but what the hell, these are already in the book we're using and they're in the right rhythm and everything. So: play that sticking on the snare drum and hihat, like in that funk groove— snare drum on 3 with whichever hand it falls on in the sticking, all the other beats on the hihat:

Then play these various stickings with that voicing over the bass drum parts from my pages of cut time funk beats. As a warm up for the mixed stickings, I suggest playing whatever groove you're working on with RH only and LH hand only.

First just add the bass drum on 1:

Continued after the break:

Cut time funk method: two-measure grooves

I've been working quite a bit with this cut time funk method from last year— part of what I've been doing instead of writing more blog posts. I'm not just writing junk to burn up bandwidth, man! Previously we had been applying a variety of two-handed hihat parts (which we get from the book Syncopation) over some one-measure funk grooves in 2/2. Now we're going to start using some four beat long patterns:

Get the pdf, we'll talk about what to do with this after the break.

Half-time feel funk: the “Syncopation” section — a small tweak

Continuing with my late Reed funk method here, which now has its own label— click on that link to get the whole series. It's becoming quite substantial— I see a book in our future...

If you've been working on the last entry in this series, you might have felt, as I have, that none of the interpretations is 100% satisfactory in creating a real, final-product funk feel. You need to apply your own musicianship, and transform the materials with your playing and improvising to turn them into something real. That's fine, you can continue developing the things you like, and understand that the things you don't like have a purpose as well. But we can also continue refining our method, to make the results hipper and more like a finished drum groove, without making the reading too absurdly, counter-productively difficult.

One of the things I don't like in the interpretations, is where you get into running 8th notes on the same drum. So let's break up any groupings of four 8th notes beamed together with a BSSB (when the grouping falls on beats 1-2) or SBBS pattern (when it falls on 3-4). To apply that, then:

When you see this rhythm in Syncopation:

You would orchestrate it this way when it falls on beats 1 and 2:

And this way when it lands on beats 3 and 4:

Continued after the break:

Half-time feel to regular 4/4

We'll be marking time a little bit this week, saving up the big, good stuff for our fund raiser, which is going to be next week. As I mentioned in our last half-time feel funk entry, you want to keep in mind that you're also going to be playing these same ideas in regular old 4/4, with the rhythmic values doubled— to make 16th notes and 8th notes, mainly. That's usually how you're going to use them, in fact.

To illustrate how that works, here again is our source idea as it appears in the book Syncopation. It says 4/4, but in playing half-time feel, we're really playing 2/2— “cut time.”

Here is the same line of music with the values doubled, which will reduce each two measures into one measure. I've added dotted barlines in the middle of the measure so it's clear where the original barlines were:

So here's the basic-form half-time feel funk groove from our last entry, as you play it reading out of the book. There's no key, but the top line is the cymbal, the middle line is the snare, and the bottom line is the bass drum:

Here's that same thing with the rhythm doubled:

Since you will mostly be playing these grooves in the 8ths-and-16ths-in-4/4 form, you might think we're making extra work for ourselves by developing them in 2/2 this way. But I've concluded that's actually a strength of this method; it gives you a commonality between your funk vocabulary and your jazz and clave-based playing— playing which is based largely on 8th note and quarter note values, at all tempos.

Half-time feel funk: the “Syncopation” section — 01

Here's a new chapter to our recent half-time feel funk series, using Progressive Steps To Syncopation, by Ted Reed. Here we're going to get into the “Syncopation” section of the book— pp. 32-44 in the old edition, the part of the book where we start seeing jazz style notation, with ties and quarter notes written on the & of the beat.

Keep in mind through all of this, we're focusing this much on half time feel because it's the best way of deriving funk-type rhythms from this book— which I like using because everyone owns it and is familiar with it. Everything we're practicing with this series is portable directly into normal playing in 4/4.

The first thing we'll do is just make an inventory of some possible orchestrations based on those pages of Reed. With the last series entries we were using the written rhythm to make a hand part, to which we added some stock bass drum parts; this time, we'll use the written rhythm to make our snare drum bass drum parts, and add a basic cymbal part to that. As in normal funk/pop/rock style, play the ride cymbal or hihat with your right hand, and the snare with your left— we won't be doing the right hand move between snare and hihat which we were doing before.

For the examples, we'll reinterpret the top part of this very familiar line from Reed— we will ignore the stems-down part written in the book. If anything is unclear, there's another set of examples in the pdf.

1. First, play the snare drum on 3, and the bass drum on everything else. When there's a rest on 3, play the closest note to 3 on the snare. You can use any cymbal part you want, but a good one to start with is quarter notes, which I've written here:

2. Play the first half of the measure on the bass drum, and the second half on the snare:

3. Then alternate between the snare and bass, starting with the bass:

4. Alternate again, but start every measure with the bass:

Now we'll divide up the parts based on short notes and long notes. Short notes are 8th notes. Long notes are everything else: quarter notes, dotted quarter notes, and tied 8th notes— those are the only values that appear in this section of Syncopation.

6. First play the short notes on the snare drum, and the long notes on the bass drum:

7. Then play the short notes on the bass drum and the long notes on the snare drum:

8. Then start each measure with the bass drum, which will determine which drum plays the long and short notes. If the first note is a short note, than the bass drum plays the short notes on that measure; if the first note is a long note, the bass plays the long notes on that measure.

Playing through the exercises, you will find plenty that sounds pretty cool, and plenty that doesn't, but don't worry about that; just play through pp. 32-44 with each of the orchestrations, and familiarize yourself with this way of reading the rhythms. There's more interesting/hipper stuff to come.

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Half-time feel funk: advanced method — open hihat

Here's the next step for this half-time funk method we've been doing, using Syncopation, by Ted Reed. On the intermediate method and on this one we'll be using the pages with quarter notes, 8th notes, and 8th rests, pp. 29-30 and 33-36 in the old edition— in the new edition I think the page numbers are one off from that. First master the basic and intermediate methods with all of the bass drum patterns before doing this method. This method is exactly the same as the intermediate method, except we'll add a closed hihat note with the foot during the rest, and an open hihat sound with the hand on the note before the closed note.

We're using natural sticking for this entire method; reading the rhythms out of the book, the right hand play all notes on the beat— the 1, 2, 3, and/or 4— the left hand any &s. The right hand plays the snare drum on 3. If there's a written rest on 3, or if an open note is called for on 3, play the snare drum on the closest available notes to beat 3, with either hand— or play the snare drum on whatever beats sound good to you. Just look at the examples on the page and play accordingly.

If you need to, you can break this down by steps:
1. Play the rhythm from the book on the hihat, with natural sticking, as described above.
2. Add the closed hihat notes with the foot on the written 8th rests.
3. Time opening the cymbals before the closed notes so that you get an open sound.
4. Move the right hand to the snare drum on 3; if that conflicts with an open hihat note, or if there's a rest on 3, play the snare drum on a different note or notes, whatever sounds good.
5. Add the bass drum rhythms from the cut time funk beats page to make a complete groove.

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Half-time feel funk: intermediate method

Here's the next phase of our little half-time feel funk method, using Ted Reed's Syncopation. We'll use pp. 29-30 out of Reed, with the quarter notes, 8th notes, and 8th rests, along with the page of bass drum grooves from before. Make sure you first play through all of the bass drum grooves along with the foundation hand part  (that's the first example on today's page), as well as the basic method from last week. We'll use the same sticking scheme as before: the right hand plays all the notes on beats 1-4, on the hihat and snare; the left hand plays any notes on the &s.

We'll still play the snare drum on beat 3, when possible; where there are rests on 3, we'll catch the snare drum on the closest note(s) to beat 3— often on an &, using the left hand. See the examples on the page, and play all of the options when you practice the exercises.

As you start moving the snare drum part around to accommodate any rests on 3, there will be some conflicts with the bass drum parts— I usually try to avoid playing a lot of unisons with the snare drum and bass drum— you can either choose to play the unisons, or drop out the bass drum where there would be a unison.

The last example on the page shows a way of making a fill— just play the end of the phrase all on the snare drum, or toms, and drop out the bassd drum. When doing the practice routine, you can do that on the 2nd/4th measure of each line, or just on the last measure of the line.

With this method and the previous one, the immediate goal is to be able to play straight through all of the exercises on the pages indicated, without stopping, with each of the bass drum patterns from the grooves page. The big test will  be to play the 48 bar exercise on page 31, with several of the bass drum patterns— whichever are your favorites.

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Half-time feel funk: basic method

Here's a basic method for working with the half time feel funk grooves from the other day. We'll be reading out of Syncopation, by Ted Reed, pp. 10-11 (from the old edition) or Lesson 4 (in the new edition).

Start by getting used to the feel of the foundation pattern, with the right hand move to the snare drum. Then play through all fifteen lines of exercises, plus the 20 bar exercise, from Syncopation, with hands only. Just keep playing the quarter note foundation pattern with the RH, and add any LHs needed on the &s to make the rhythms in the book. Then play through all the patterns again, adding a bass drum hit on beat 1— pattern 1 from the basic cut time funk grooves page. You should be able to repeat this with the other first four bass drum patterns without too much difficulty; grooves 5-18, with the BD on the &s, may be more of a challenge.

Finally, when you're able to play straight through all of the exercises with all of the bass drum patterns, play them again omitting the circled bass drum notes from the grooves page. It sounds like a lot of stuff, but once you learn a few key patterns, the rest of them become very easy.

Get cracking, the hip things we'll do with this are yet to come...

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Basic cut time funk beats

Today we have a page of basic funk grooves in 2/2— cut time, half-time feel, whatever you want to call it. I haven't given a cymbal part, because we'll be doing some different things with it, using Syncopation.

For now, play them with any cymbal pattern of your choice. You'll probably want to start with quarter notes, 8th notes, half notes, and 2 and 4. Once you have the basic groove, continue playing it while omitting the circled bass drum note. Then improvise your own grooves. You could also combine first and second measures from different exercises, but that will eat up a lot of practice time, and I think it's unnecessary.

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Doubling up a ballad feel with Syncopation

Happy new year, everybody. I'm practicing a lot of slow tempos lately, so here are some Reed interpretations that will be familiar to all jazz students, written out to suggest double time during a ballad. You'll be using sticks to play the exercises, but once you've gotten these together, you should be able to render something similar with brushes. First, without getting too much beyond the scope of a little blog post, we should clarify a few things about this feel. Give a listen to this recording of Dexter Gordon playing Body & Soul:





The tune is in 4/4, with a quarter note pulse of about 57 beats per minute, using what I call a compound subdivision of both triplets and straight 8th notes— any musician may play off of either subdivision at any time. You can also hear that at different moments, they may generate a swing feel based on the even 8ths, as if they were quarter notes at ~114 beats per minute. You can hear that most clearly during the piano solo after about 4:58.

Reading out of Syncopation, then, the slow quarter note pulse of our imaginary original ballad feel will fall on the half notes in Reed. So one measure of ballad 4/4 will equal two measures out of Reed, using this time feel:

To further muddy the waters, if we forget about the ballad thing, and just play Reed at a medium tempo (say, oh, 114 bpm), with the above time feel, we're actually making a half-time feel out of it by putting the hihat on beat 3, and playing half notes (plus the skip note) on the ride cymbal. But that's rarely done in jazz— virtually all of the time you play this feel, it will be because you are doubling up on a slow tempo. So we are learning vocabulary for an implied time feel, and you should not expect to see this exact feel, with the hihat on 3, “in nature.”

Now that we've settled that, on the examples, we'll be using the first four measures of the long exercise on p. 37, which should be very familiar to you. We'll be orchestrating the melody line— the top line— with our time feel, and ignoring the bottom line. You'll be practicing these applications while reading pages 32-44 of Reed.

See how we'll apply this to our ballad feel after the break:

Half-time feel rock using Syncopation

Extending my previous series on making rock/pop beats using Ted Reed's Syncopation, here is a way of making a half time feel using the same concept, except we play quarter notes on the hihat, and catch beat 3 on the snare drum, instead of 2 and 4. The tempo of the quarter note pulse should be bright:

Many of the resulting beats will be useful as conditioners and for gaining familiarity with the feel as anything else; some of them have very dense bass drum parts, and this has a much lower percentage of ordinarily usable beats than the regular rock piece did. You'll have to play a lot of exercises and find the ones that work for you musically.

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Listening example and explanation after the break:

Double time feel / half time feel

Hm, maybe being extraordinarily busy will force me to finally do some things that are actually accessible to people. Here's another easy thing, illustrating half time feel and double time feel using basic rock beats. Playing a double time or half time feel in this case means halving or doubling the feel rhythmically within the original tempo-- instead of playing the snare drum backbeats on beats 2 and 4, you play them on beat 3, or on the &s of every beat. A true double time or half time involves an actual change in tempo, and would be written the same as the original beat-- the first two measures of each line-- with a written notation telling you to play half (or twice) as fast.

Play each section with repeats and without, then play the entire page without stopping.

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