Hi all, welcome to my third blog. I have had an idea circling in my brain for a few weeks now for an interesting groove to test my coordination. Working straight out of my head it was getting the better of me and I couldn’t quite see how it was going to go together, so to get a good grasp of it I decided to write the exercise out in full so I could see it on paper. This is great for two reasons: firstly about ten minutes after I’d printed it out I could play it no problems (I wish I had done that sooner) and secondly it means I can share it with you in my blog and you can pass it onto others in the drumming community.
Have a look at the whole exercise below. It’s based on a hand pattern that moves in cycles of three 16th notes (RLR) and a bass drum rhythm that moves in cycles of five 16th notes (F~F~~). So I have given it the catchy title ‘3 Over 5 Groove Coordination Challenge’. The way it is arranged it takes five bars of 6/4 to complete the whole polyrhythm cycle.
The main benefit to your playing from completing this challenge will be increased coordination. As the hand and foot patterns are in different time signatures they will constantly change their alignment with one another leading to numerous combinations of limbs and accents as you move through the exercise. This will help free you up on the drum kit allowing a greater freedom of expression and creativity.
It is my mission at Element Drum Tuition to provide people with high quality, clear and progressive drum material. So, although it’s a challenge I thought it would be helpful to recommend some preliminary exercises to help build up to the full challenge. It will also help you see where the idea has come from.
A little note at this point – although it didn’t take too long to get once I’d written it down I would view this as quite an advanced exercise that would suit more experienced drummers. I think the easiest way to tell if you’re ready to work on it is to look at the first preliminary exercise. If you find this unattainable you’d probably want to come back to the challenge once your knowledge and skill base has developed. If this is the case and you want some easy groove based challenges to help you progress your drumming you could try studying ‘Groove Freedom 01‘ available from the product page of my website or from Amazon.
Ok, so the first preliminary exercise is the halftime shuffle; this is where the inspiration for the hand pattern came from. Make sure you pay close attention to the hand accents on the Snare and Hi Hats.
The second preliminary exercise takes the RLR hand pattern (the block of three 16th notes) from the halftime shuffle and plays it over 16th notes in 6/4. I have then added a backbeat on beats 2, 4 and 6 to give it a regular groove sound. This means the first snare backbeat is on its own, the second has a grace note after it and the third backbeat has a grace note before it, giving your left hand a really dynamic workout. Now play the right hand on the ride with the accents on the bell of the ride cymbal and practise adding the quarter note on the left foot. At this point you might also want to experiment with adding some simple bass drum patterns such as playing the bass drum on beats 1, 3 and 5 to get used to the four way coordination.
The third step is to play the foot ostinato in isolation. The bass drum rhythm is five 16th notes long (F~F~~). When playing a quarter note pulse on the left foot it takes five beats for the whole cycle to repeat, so this exercise is in 5/4.
Step four gets you playing up beat and down beat 16th notes on the bass drum together with the hand pattern and left foot. These will help, as in the final challenge the bass drum alternates between playing two up-beat 16th notes and two down beat 16th notes.
Once you have worked your way through these four preliminary exercises you should be in a good position to tackle the challenge. Remember to take your time, practise slowly, break it into manageable chunks and work with a metronome.
Please let me know if you enjoyed this challenge and feel free to pass the link to other drummers. If you have any ideas for topics that you feel would be beneficial to your drumming and would like me to cover in my blog, then please get in touch. Good luck and happy drumming until next time.
Play drums. Play music.