(mellow bass music)
- What's up gang?
J.P. Bouvet here with my band Childish Japes.
Asher Kurtz on guitar.
Jed Lingat on bass.
We're hanging out here at the beautiful Drumeo facilities.
And today I wanna talk to you about
what I consider to be
the four most important drum grooves.
I'm gonna show you what they are
and then I'm gonna explain--
I'm gonna show you what they are
and you're gonna be like
eh, that's kinda simple.
I know those grooves.
But then I'm gonna explain how far these go
and then we're gonna demonstrate some examples
with the band so you can see
the reason that they're so important
to be super comfortable with.
The first one is an eighth-note groove,
which I'm sure all of you have played
because it's usually the first thing we learn.
So, we're just gonna think about the hands right now.
We've got one and two and three and four and.
(slow drum music)
In center groove number two is a 16th-note groove
with your right hand playing all the 16th notes.
This is gonna force you to slow down a little bit.
(slow drum music)
Center groove number three is 6/8 straight time.
So now we're thinking one and two and three
and four and five and six and one, two, three,
snare drum's on four.
(slow drum music)
The fourth groove here is,
it's gonna be the curve ball when you're working
on stuff here.
Cause now we enter the world of triplets.
It's half-time triplet groove.
So, at a glance it's gonna sound like the first one,
but now we're thinking triplets.
So we're thinking one and a two and a three
and a four and a one and a two and a three
and a four and a.
(slow drum music)
So, why do I consider these grooves so important, right?
They seem fairly simple,
but a better way to think about this is that
each one is a groove setting,
and within that groove setting,
you can work on freeing up the kicks
from the beginning.
Or you can work on ghost note exercises.
You can move the back beat around.
You know, you can add embellishments
and do all sorts of things.
You can move your right hand all over the place.
So, there's infinite possibilities
within each of these four important, essential grooves.
And, the reason I consider them sort of essential
in a sense is that in my drumming career so far,
pretty much everything I've been asked to play,
I mean you could safely say like 98% of it,
fits into one of those four categories
that I just described.
So, even things that might come to mind they're like
well, what about 7/8, you know?
With 7/8 it's just the first example minus a beat.
So, if you can get
a wide array of vocabulary within each of those,
then whether you're jamming or you're writing
or you're performing your solo
or you're just playing by yourself,
you're not gonna hit a lot of road blocks, right?
So, if you've done all those at various tempos,
you're gonna be pretty comfortable
in most musical situations.
So, I want to emphasize
the usefulness of these grooves for a moment
in a jamming context.
Cause this band, Childish Japes,
we write a lot of our music based on jamming
and sitting together either one-on-one
or as a trio.
And we either bring ideas to the table,
or we just start making stuff up on the spot.
And, it's a really common problem for I know
a lot of people,
self included, to feel like you're always playing
the same stuff,
or you know with a band especially,
you get kinda stuck in the same tempos,
in the same rhythms and stuff.
So, just being aware of these
four different types of grooves will be a really easy
first step to push you and your band into new territory
that you might have never actually explored before
or at least, you know,
you explore far, far less frequently.
So, I'm just gonna run through
these different types of grooves
and see what it inspires in the band.
And, we have no plan here.
This is all just gonna be made up on the spot.
But, that just goes to speak for
how different of ideas that it's gonna inspire
in these guys' minds as well as in my own drumming.
So, let's do it.
Eighth-note groove first.
As we go through these grooves,
I'm gonna start with a fairly simple version
of the groove.
And I'm gonna start to embellish.
I'm gonna start to add some stuff
so that you can see what I mean
by it being a groove setting, and within that setting,
you're able to do quite a lot.
That'll make it very obvious that--
it'll make it very obvious that
you could work on these four grooves
for the rest of your life
when you take into account all the different things
you can do within them.
So, let's hit it.
I'll start playing and then you jump in,
and we'll see where it goes.
(moderate drum music)
(mellow bass music)
Alright.
Groove number two is 16th-note groove.
(slow drum music)
(mellow bass music)
Groove number three, 6/8 straight time.
(upbeat drum music)
(mellow bass music)
Groove number four, triplet half-time.
(slow drum music)
(mellow bass music)
So there you've got those four most important grooves,
those groove settings that we talk about.
And as you can see,
as we jump from one to the next,
it brings out different ideas in me,
and it would bring out different ideas
that I can go practice in the practice room,
but it also brings out different ideas
for my band mates.
Alright, so those grooves just inspired
totally different things for us.
So, I'm hoping that these creative tools,
but simple but effective creative tools can help you
and the musicians you play with
to escape that terrible feeling of oh,
I'm always playing the same stuff.
We're always playing the same stuff.
And yeah, I hope you get a lot of mileage out of it.
We did a much more in depth course on this
with the Drumeo gangs.
You can find that on Drumeo.com.
And, if you wanna find the music
from the band, Childish Japes,
you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, iTunes, Spotify,
wherever you find music and people.
Thanks for watching.
Have a good day.
(mellow bass music)