Polyrhythmic Triplet Groove - Dave Major

What's happening guys? Welcome back into the Drum Central YouTube channel. My name is Dave Major. It's Friday, lick of the week time. So what we're going to do today, we're going to apply a 4 note phrase into 16th note triplets to create a half time 16th note triplet slash shuffle groove. It sounds very complex but grab the PDF in the description below and it's going to become really super easy. So I'm going to use a really common phrase, it's going to be right, left, left, kick. I've played that loads, it's cropped up so much, I use it all the time in my own playing. We're going to invert it and put the kick drum at the start. So instead of being right, left, left, kick, it's going to be kick, right, left, left. Now that is 4 notes long, so naturally we want to play that in 16th note. It'll be 1 e and a, 2 e and a, kick, right, left, left, kick, right, left, left. But we're going to play it in 16th note triplets. Now that means that in a bar of 16th note triplets there are 24 notes and this thing is going to fit 6 times. So that sounds like this. What we're going to do is instead of playing it just as a little fill, we're going to make it a groove. Now in order to make it a groove we need some form of strong snare drum, a backbeat. We're going to put it on beat 2 and 4. Now, that means that it's going to fall on the second double left on the first note. So it's going to sound like this. Now what I did in the intro was I diddled one of those bass drums, that's a totally cool option, gives you a stuttery kind of feel. Let's try this, nice and slow at 50 beats a minute and if you listen and watch the click it will be counting your 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's try it a smidge faster at 60 beats a minute and it starts to kind of get less of an exercise feel and more like a groove. Now at the full sort of intro speed that I played at 70 beats a minute, it sounds pretty cool on the hi-hat, it would sound pretty cool on the crash cymbal, but I chucked it over on the stacker for a more aggressive sound and that way you're kind of leaning more towards playing it heavier, those diddles don't stick out too much. Let's try it at 70 and I'll use the stacker this time. So there's our polyrhythmic 16th note triplet half time shuffle groove, but it comes out of something that's really common to play, right left left kick, we invert it, we get a little bit creative, we make sure there's a backbeat and suddenly it becomes something that does not sound like the original idea. I hope you guys dug this lesson, if you did please hit subscribe and I'll catch you next time.