Herbie Hancock’s band on his classic mid-70s funk albums went on without Herbie as The Headhunters. Their biggest hit, “God Make Me Funky”, has been sampled in several hundred rap songs, and rightly so, it’s an amazing groove.

Here’s an annotated listening guide to the track.

  • 0:00 – Mike Clark‘s drums enter.
  • 0:11 – Bill Summers‘ congas enter.
  • 0:31 – DeWayne McKnight‘s wah-wah guitar enters.
  • 0:51 – Paul Jackson‘s bass enters, as does an overdubbed DeWayne McKnight guitar part.
  • 1:32 – Verse one, sung by Paul Jackson.
  • 1:51 – Chorus one, with backing vocals by The Pointer Sisters.
  • 2:11 – Break, same as the intro groove.
  • 2:31 – Verse two.
  • 2:51 – I’m not sure what to call this section. The second half of verse two? The prechorus?
  • 3:30 – Chorus two. At 3:57, it ends with a bar of 5/8.
  • 3:49 – The bridge. I count it as a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/8, a bar of 9/8, and another bar of 4/4.
  • 3:57 – Bennie Maupin‘s long and crazy sax solo. At 6:36, the vocals re-enter, singing “anything you want” repeatedly through the rest of the solo.
  • 8:01 – The outtro, the chorus repeated through the fadeout.

In this interview, Mike Clark says that he and Paul Jackson wrote the tune for a radio commercial advertising the BBQ restaurant next door to their house. People started calling the radio station asking about the music in the ad, and the rest is funk history.

I enjoy all of this, but the first minute and a half is the part that really hits me in the brainstem. Here’s my transcription:

Each part stays on a rock-steady groove with hardly any variation or fills. I used red to highlight the few breaks in the pattern.

I’m working on a new method for learning funky rhythms. The idea is to start with an extremely simplified version of the groove that only uses quarter notes. Then you work through progressively more complex variations. You add eighth note offbeats, then sixteenth note offbeats, anticipate and delay things from strong beats to weaker subdivisions, and so on, until finally you are playing the actual groove. At each intermediate step, the pattern should sound good, if perhaps not quite as funky as the real groove. Using this method, here’s my derivation of Mike Clark’s drum pattern:

The heart of this rhythm is the kick drum on the sixteenth note before beat three. To understand why it’s so impactful, you have to know the definition of syncopation. You can organize the beats and subdivisions in a bar from strongest to weakest. The strong beats are where you expect the rhythmic accents to be. Syncopation is the sound of accents falling unexpectedly on weak beats or offbeat subdivisions. The strongest beat is the downbeat, by definition. The next strongest beat is the one that’s halfway through the bar, beat three. It’s so strong, in fact, that it almost feels like another downbeat, and is sometimes called “the invisible barline.” The backbeats, two and four, are the next weakest beats. The eighth note offbeats in between beats one, two, three and four are even weaker. The sixteenth note offbeats in between the beats and the eighth note offbeats are weaker still.

So with that information in mind, here’s what’s happening in the “God Make Me Funky” groove. The simplest possible way to make a rock/pop/soul/funk beat is to put kick drums on beats one and three (the strongest beats) and snare drums on beats two and four (the weaker beats). That’s the first pattern in my derivation. If you add hi-hats on all the eighth note offbeats, as in the second pattern in my derivation, you get the beat from “Billie Jean.” The main difference between this groove and “God Make Me Funky” is that in “God Make Me Funky”, the kick drum on beat three is a sixteenth note early. That moves it from the second strongest position in the bar to one of the weakest subdivisions. You have this generally very stable rhythm with one severely destabilizing event in the middle of it. Mike Clark also adds a kick on the sixteenth note before beat one, which is also an exceptionally weak subdivision. If you add a couple of hi-hats on sixteenth note offbeats, then you have “God Make Me Funky.”

I won’t get into the subtleties of Bill Summers’ conga part, because I don’t know enough about congas to be able to transcribe it accurately, but the basic idea is simple: he plays on every sixteenth note, with accents on the backbeats, and subtle accents on various eighth note offbeat subdivisions.

There is more to the groove than the placement of drum hits on the grid. Mike Clark and Bill Summers are not playing perfectly quantized rhythms; they use subtle microtiming as well. Here’s a close look at measure six, which is a popular one to sample. The grid lines are sixteenth note subdivisions. The big peaks are kicks and snares.

Clark and Summers play their eighth notes straight in nearly perfect metronomic time. (The hi-hat on the “and” of two is a little late.) The sixteenth note offbeats are all late by varying amounts. The simplest way to describe this lateness is to say that the groove uses light sixteenth note swing. However, this misses the fact that the swing varies from one subdivision to the next. The sixteenth right after the downbeat is swung widely, whereas the one after beat four isn’t swung at all. If you quantize the groove to a sixteenth note swing template, like Ableton’s “Swing 16ths 59” setting, it still sounds good, but it loses color and feel.

Okay. So. Remember how the most salient event in the drum pattern is that syncopated kick drum, a sixteenth note before beat three? Because it’s swung, the kick is actually slightly behind that weak subdivision. So it’s earlier than you expect, but then once you have adjusted your expectation, the kick is later than you expect. There are layers!

Here I’ve broken the drum and conga patterns into their individual components.

And here’s the same thing in radial view.

Here’s a derivation of Paul Jackson’s bassline:

The main rhythmic event is the peculiar timing of the long low E. The most obvious place for it would be on beat two, preceded by the high E on the downbeat. However, the high E is anticipated by a sixteenth note, and the low E is anticipated by an eighth note. Hip!

Derivation of DeWayne McKnight’s guitar part:

That long F-sharp in the first bar of the pattern is the most ear-grabbing feature. It’s an unusual note to accent so heavily in the key of E. In the most simplified version of the groove, I have the F-sharp starting on beat three. In the subsequent versions, I keep moving it earlier and earlier until in the actual guitar part, it lands on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat two.

All these details are interesting, but why do they add up to such an intensely funky groove? There are a lot of factors, but the main thing for me is the musicians’ laser focus. Mike Clark, Bill Summers, DeWayne McKnight and Paul Jackson play their parts and play them right. There is no indecision, no noodling around. When the band opens up more under Bennie Maupin’s saxophone solo, it’s exciting, but not nearly as funky. They play with plenty of imagination and feeling, but I miss the tension of the opening groove.

Hearing other funk bands really brings home how important the machine-like repetition is. Over the weekend, I went with the family to hear the Stoop Kidz Brass Band. They are terrific musicians with a repertoire ranging from P-Funk to Stevie Wonder to Duran Duran. But they have two problems: they play everything a little too fast, and their drummer is too “interesting.” He uses a different pattern in every section of every song. He plays all of it well! But at the show, every time he changed the musical subject, he let all the air out of the balloon. It’s significant that once he settled into a steadier pattern, people started dancing. Funk works best when the musicians subsume their egos into the groove.