Cascara Groove - Drum Central

Hi everyone, welcome back into the Drum Central YouTube channel. As always my name is Dave Major and we're here with another Lick of the Week. So what we're going to do today is we're going to take our standard Afro-Cuban pattern called the Cascara or Cascara, if you're from Scotland and you don't say it right, and we're going to play it and we're going to fill in some gaps and create a groove out of it as opposed to just playing it in its traditional style or drum kit style. So grab the PDF below it's going to be a lot easier and let's get started. Now the Cascara is a bell pattern or shell pattern that's played on the shell of a timbale, usually played by the timbale players but we could kind of approximate it, sometimes we'll play it on the bell or the rim of our toms, we'll play it on the hi-hat, we'll do these kind of different things. In a traditional sense you'd play maybe a left hand playing the clave, you get this. What we're going to do is we're going to take the right hand, it's going to stay on the hi-hat, we're going to see if we can make a funk groove out of it. So the Cascara pattern is like little ones and twos, almost binary code. We're going to have two ones to the start, so it's one, one, and three twos, one two, one two, one two, then a one, and then a one at the end which kind of becomes a two because it jumps over the bar. Check it. Now that is counted, one and two ee, a three and a ee ah, and we're going to fill in all the gaps with our left hand, so that sounds like this. Now we could add a two and a four, there's already a four in the left hand but we'd have to add one on our in on two because it'd be coming underneath the first set of two twos, or first set of twos on the hi-hat. What I'm going to do is we're going to play one back beat, it's going to go in the and of two, right after that first one, one, one, two, and that's going to be our back beat. So every other snare drum note that's soft, I'm just going to bring up that left hand on the and of two, sounds like this. Now we're going to add some kick drums. I like to add it on one and, and then we're going to do the ah ee with a little hi-hat lift right at the end of the bar, so one and two ee, a three and a ee ah, and then we're going to have the ah of four as well, so it goes bubble, so whole thing, nice and slow, sounds like this. Now a little bit faster, sounds like this. We bump it back up to normal tempo or the intro tempo of 100. What I'm going to do is I'm going to play it a couple of times on the hi-hat, then we move to the ride cymbal, standard verse chorus kind of idea, but with this intricate pattern it does sound really cool. Check it out. So I'm going to incorporate a left hand hi-hat ghost notes, maybe a little bit of toms, that kind of idea. Taking traditional Brazilian or Afro-Cuban patterns and trying to, not modernize them, but apply them to something that maybe would be useful in a totally different context is a really great way of getting used to that syncopated funk idea. Gives you some cool ideas of being creative and it can go somewhere really, really nice. If you guys dug this lesson, which I'm totally sure you did, please hit subscribe and I'll catch you next time.