I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use complex syncopated rhythms that are hard for beginners. Meanwhile, the music in beginner-level method books is rhythmically bland and unfunky. What do we do?
Heather takes a creative approach to arranging for her school bands. For each part, she creates two versions: a simplified one and an advanced one, which she places side by side in the score. Students can start out playing the simplified versions, and when they are ready to challenge themselves with the “real” music, they can just jump seamlessly over. This enables Heather to accommodate players at different levels in the same ensemble. I like this idea, and it made me think we should do something similar for groove pedagogy. My thought was this: for each groove, create a series of simplified versions, moving in incremental steps from basic quarter notes to the full syncopated complexity of the actual music. The real challenge is that we want each version of the groove to be musically satisfying, so even if you can’t handle the pure uncut funk yet, you can at least play something that sounds good.
In this post, I test the method out on the Funky Drummer break. The video below shows an Ableton Live session I made that moves from an extremely simplified quarter note version through incrementally more advanced rhythms every four bars.
Here’s the sequence in notation.
Let’s talk through the steps:
- Begin with a beat played on quarter notes only.
- Add hi-hats on the eighth note offbeats.
- Add kicks on the eighth note offbeats.
- Omit the kicks on the “and” of two and on three.
- Add hi-hats on the sixteenth note offbeats.
- Insert a snare on the sixteenth note offbeat after beat three.
- Insert a snare on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat three.
- Insert a snare on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat one.
- Insert a snare on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat four.
- Anticipate the kick on the “and” of four by a sixteenth note.
- Add an open hi-hat on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat three.
- Add an open hi-hat on the sixteenth note offbeat after beat four.
- Apply groove (this requires some explaining, read on.)
At the beginning of this post, I used the word “groove” to mean music based on short, internally complex repeated cells. But in the context of step 13, “groove” refers to something else: the microtiming of Clyde Stubblefield’s drum performance. Here’s an annotated screencap of the Funky Drummer break against a sixteenth note grid:
These participatory discrepancies are not sloppiness; they are essential to the break’s musical impact. You can demonstrate this for yourself by quantizing Clyde’s playing to the grid. The result won’t be totally unmusical, but it won’t have nearly the same power. You can’t represent this kind of microtiming in notation. (Well, you can, but then your notation will be unreadable.) However, you can easily visualize microtiming using a DAW, and you can replicate it too. To get the “groove” version of the drum pattern, I used Ableton’s audio-to-MIDI function, but I could also have extracted the groove and quantized the MIDI to it to get the same result. I can’t play a funk beat with anything like Clyde Stubblefield’s level of nuance and precision, but I can move my MIDI events around to create subtle grooves of my own.
(We should recognize here that groove is not only a matter of timing. It’s also about dynamics and timbre and other intangibles. However, those are beyond the scope of this post.)
I showed a version of this idea to someone, and he compared it to species counterpoint for rhythm. I resisted the idea at first because I had a bad time with species counterpoint in grad school, but I see where the comparison comes from. In the same way that species counterpoint doesn’t reflect the actual compositional process of European canonical composers, the steps I lay out here don’t reflect the process that Clyde Stubblefield used to create the Funky Drummer groove. I am presenting a way to learn the groove, not an explanation of how people create grooves like this in the first place. I have sometimes followed a mental process like this when creating my own music, but the process isn’t so linear or easy to explain. If you do want to read about Clyde Stubblefield’s possible inspirations for the Funky Drummer beat, I recommend Alexander Stewart’s 2000 article, “Funky Drummer”: New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music.
Anyway, that’s my idea for groove pedagogy. I’ll have more information about the book as they get closer to completion. I’m also planning to use this approach the next time I teach music theory at the New School. Maybe I’ll find some other opportunities to put this into practice too.