Groove

In the chapters so far every note sat neatly on a beat. The pulse was even, the note values added up to bars, the rests were in their places. That is enough for a march or a lullaby. But put on any dance music of the last hundred and twenty years, from ragtime and jazz to funk, house and hip-hop, and you find that the interesting part happens between the beats.

This chapter is a drum workshop. The instrument is a drum machine: sixteen cells to a bar, a few drums and a Play button. Each section builds one groove on it and teaches one idea.

Even means dull

Press Play. The kick and the hi-hat strike together, exactly on every beat: one, two, three, four. All correct, not a single miss. Listen like that for about ten seconds.

You can listen to it, but your body does not respond. Now switch the beat to "Rock". The drums are the same, kick, snare and hi-hat, yet your head starts nodding on its own. The count under the machine shows the difference: in "Straight" every hit sits on a beat, while in the rock beat five hits out of thirteen fall off it.

What makes you nod, musicians call groove. It has no strict definition, but you can take apart what it is made of. Nearly all of those parts have to do with what sits off the beat.

Play with it yourself. Tap the cells to switch hits on and off. The drum's name on the left mutes its whole row: try taking out the hi-hat or the snare and listen to what is left.

Sixteen cells

The step grid of a drum machine splits a bar into sixteen cells. In 4/4 time each beat gets four cells, and every cell is a sixteenth: half as long as the eighth from chapter 7. The cells where beats begin have a darker outline on the machine. Halfway between them are the eighth-note "ands", and the cells between a beat and its "and" are the sixteenths.

Sixteenths take some getting used to: they are harder to count than "one-and-two-and". Drummers count them "one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a", where the "e" and the "a" are the sixteenths on either side of the "and". The ear gets used to them through the hand. Start by tapping eighths, two taps to every click of the metronome.

Now four times as often: four taps to a click. The tempo is lower, but your hand works faster. If you lose your place, tap with two fingers in turn, the way a drummer uses two sticks.

The backbeat: a hit on two and four

Now build a rock beat step by step. Start with the simplest version: the kick on "one" and "three", the snare on "two" and "four". Press Play.

In chapter 6 the first beat was the strong one, and in a bar of four the third as well. Those are exactly the beats the kick marks. The snare hits the weak beats, the second and the fourth, and hits them harder than anything else. This is called the backbeat. Most popular music of the second half of the 20th century rests on it: rock and roll, soul, pop, rock. When a concert crowd claps on two and four, it is playing the backbeat.

Add the hi-hat in eighths. It accents nothing. It splits each beat in half and keeps time, like the second hand of a clock.

And the last step: one more kick on the "and" of beat three, in cell 11. One hit off the beat, and the groove starts to push forward.

The snare is moved from "two" and "four" to "one" and "three", onto the same beats as the kick. What disappears?

The backbeat: the accent on the weak beats The pulse: the beats become uneven The downbeat: you can no longer hear "one"

The beats stay even, and "one" gets even louder, since two drums now play on it. What goes is the back and forth between kick and snare that rock rests on: the stress on the weak beats. Try it on the first drum machine in this section by moving the snare hits to cells 1 and 9.

Syncopation: a hit off the beat

The kick on the "and" in the last rock step is a small syncopation. Here it is on its own, on a single note. Below is one bar of eight cells, each an eighth, with a kick on every beat underneath. A cell that is on is a note, and it lasts until the next cell that is on.

Start with "On the beat": four notes, each on its own beat, no syncopation. Now try "Charleston", the figure people danced to in the 1920s. The second note starts on the "and" of beat two and carries on through beat three, and beat three is stronger than any "and". The widget highlights a note like that and writes it out: an eighth with a half note tied to it across the middle of the bar.

That is syncopation: a note starts in a weak place and keeps sounding where the ear expects a new hit. The strong beat goes by in silence, because the stress went to the note before it. The ear waits for a hit on "three", does not get it, and that thwarted expectation feels like a push.

Try "Tresillo": three notes grouped 3 + 3 + 2 eighths. This figure is the basis of the Cuban habanera, came through it into American music around the time of ragtime and early jazz, and can still be heard in a great many pop songs. "All off" puts all four notes on the "ands": four syncopations, and after a couple of bars the ear is no longer sure where the beat is. Switch the kick off with the button at the bottom and the bar falls apart completely: syncopation needs a beat to push against.

Tap some syncopations yourself. Every bar has a note that starts on an "and" and holds through a beat. Count "one-and-two-and" in your head and tap on the right syllables: a tap on the "and", nothing on the beat.

And by ear: a rhythm plays and you pick how it is written. Some of the options are even rhythms and some are syncopated. The one with two dotted quarters in a row is the tresillo.

"Maple Leaf Rag": syncopation in the right hand

Ragtime works like a syncopation exercise for two hands. The left hand walks evenly, like a march: bass, chord, chord, bass, an eighth for each step. Over it the right hand plays a figure that keeps arguing with the beats. Below are the first four bars of "Maple Leaf Rag" as printed in the first edition. The piece is in 2/4, two beats to the bar, and every cell of the picture is a sixteenth.

First switch on only the left hand. It is even, almost dull: eighths in a row, bass, chord, chord, bass. Add the right hand and the even walk turns into ragtime. The most striking notes in the right hand, the E flat octaves, rarely land on a beat: of the nine octaves, only two do. The first falls on the "and" of beat one, the second on the sixteenth after beat two. In the second bar the octave is struck on the last sixteenth of beat one and held through beat two. Notes like these have a frame round them in the picture: they are syncopations by our definition.

"Right hand as percussion" takes away the pitches and leaves claps on the octaves and clicks on the other notes. That way you can hear that syncopation here belongs to the rhythm, not the melody. Beat two of the first bar is the classic ragtime figure: sixteenth, eighth, sixteenth. The long note in the middle of the beat is the push.

Tap that figure. The tempo is slow, as Joplin advised.

Now set the ragtime widget to a higher tempo, 110 or 120 BPM. The notes are the same, but the syncopations blur into a scramble. Joplin knew what he was writing about.

Four classic beats

You now have everything you need to read a drum machine. The rock beat is already built. Here are three more beats that have run through music for decades.

House: the kick on every beat

In house, techno and disco the kick plays all four beats. This is four on the floor, the very beat you looked for the pulse in back in chapter 6. A kick on its own is a metronome: the "Straight" beat from the start of the chapter.

The groove appears when an open hi-hat goes between the beats, on every "and". The kick says "one", the hi-hat answers "and", and you get the back-and-forth swing people dance to. The clap on "two" and "four" is the familiar backbeat.

Hip-hop: the kick off the beat

In hip-hop the snare usually keeps the backbeat, while the kick roams freely between the beats. In this example the second kick sits in cell 8, on the last sixteenth of beat two, and pushes the groove towards beat three. It is syncopation, played on drums. Many beats of the late 1980s and the 1990s were made on samplers and on drum machines like the Roland TR-808, which has a long, booming kick that can be stretched out almost into a bass. The machine came out in 1980, and in 1982 it supplied the rhythm of "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, one of the most influential records of early hip-hop and electro.

Bossa nova: the clave

Brazilian bossa nova rests on a figure the drummer usually plays on the rim of the snare, as rimshots. It is called the bossa nova clave. It is five hits across sixteen cells: 1, 4, 7, 11, 14. Cuban music has a similar figure, the son clave, except that its last hit comes one cell earlier, in 13. The whole difference lies in that one-cell delay.

Move the last hit from cell 14 to cell 13 and you get the son clave. Listen to the two in turn. In the son clave the last hit falls exactly on beat four, while in the bossa nova it comes a sixteenth late and hangs between the beats.

All these beats, plus ragtime translated for drums, are in the machine below. Choose "Ragtime": the kick plays the basses of Joplin's left hand, the hi-hat its chords, the clap the right-hand octaves and the rimshot the other notes. The syncopation of ragtime sounds like a beat.

The "To the Notebook" button sends the beat to the drum track of your Notebook. Make one of your own: take any preset, move a couple of hits off the beat, take out what you don't need, and send it. At the end of the chapter the Notebook plays it under your melody.

Swing: how late to be

Groove has a second side: not which cells are on, but exactly when the hits sound. Start the machine below and move the "Swing" slider.

At 50% the beat is straight. The further right the slider goes, the more it sways: every second sixteenth starts to arrive late, and the pairs of hits become "long, short". This is swing. In jazz it is usually the eighths that swing, in hip-hop and house often the sixteenths. Sheet music usually does not show swing: it has straight eighths and the word "swing", and players play them unevenly.

On drum machines swing is measured in percent. How that percentage is counted is easiest to see close up. Below is one beat, enlarged: straight hits at the top, the same hits with swing at the bottom.

The percentage says how much of a pair its first note takes up. At 50% the pair splits in half: a straight rhythm. At 66% the first note takes two thirds of the pair and the second one third, so the long note is twice as long as the short one, as in a triplet. Hence the name "triplet swing". At 75% the first takes three quarters of the pair, and the second sixteenth nearly sticks to the next beat. At 90 BPM a swing of 66% moves every second sixteenth by about 53 milliseconds. That is a twentieth of a second, and the ear hears the difference at once.

Look at the "Hi-hat plays" switch. Sixteenth swing moves only the second sixteenth in each eighth. If the hi-hat plays eighths, there is nothing to move, and the beat sounds straight however far you push the slider. This is a common trap in a DAW: swing is on and nothing happens, because the swing grid and the notes are different lengths. Set "Swing grid" to eighths, and now the eighths start to sway.

This machine has a "To the Notebook" button too. The beat goes there with its swing: the Notebook counts it in the same percentages and can also swing either eighths or sixteenths.

Train your ear. You hear two bars of a beat with sixteenths on the hi-hat. Is it straight or swung?

Now a finer one: between straight and triplet there is light swing, and beyond triplet, heavy swing.

A DAW is set to sixteenth swing at 66%. Where does the second sixteenth of each eighth sound now?

In the last third of the eighth, like the third note of a triplet Exactly in the middle of the eighth, as without swing 66% earlier than without swing

The percentage is the share of the pair that the first note takes. 66% means the first sixteenth lasts two thirds of the eighth and the second begins in the last third. That is where the third note of a triplet sits. Swing always delays the second note and never moves it earlier.

Three against two

The swung pair "long, short" is close to a triplet: three notes in the space of two. Play three and two at the same time, with different hands, and you get a polyrhythm, three against two. You find it in West African music, in Latin American music, in classical music and in jazz.

The cycle splits into six equal cells. The right hand hits cells 1, 3 and 5, the left 1 and 4. Together they make the figure "both, right, left, right". First listen to it at a slow tempo and switch off each hand in turn, then try "4 against 3": there the cycle splits into twelve cells, and following both hands at once is much harder.

Now with both hands. The left hand is Space, the right any note key on the computer keyboard. On a MIDI keyboard the left hand plays below middle C (C4), the right above it. On a phone there are two buttons.

Quantising: the grid and the human

A drum machine hits the cells exactly. A person cannot: even a good drummer strays from the grid by a few milliseconds, and a beginner by tens of them. In a DAW one button fixes that. Quantising takes every note you played and moves it to the nearest line of the grid.

Try it on yourself. Press "Record 2 bars": you get a bar of count-in, then two bars with the metronome in which you tap whatever you like, syncopations, the ragtime figure, a beat. Space, the keys, a MIDI keyboard or the big button all work. Until you record something, the quantiser holds an example: a syncopated figure with human mistakes in it. The "Example of live playing" button brings it back.

The top row is how you played. Green dots are within 15 ms of the grid, grey ones 15 to 40 ms away, red ones more than 40 ms. The bottom row is after quantising, and the lines show where each note moved. At a strength of 100% every dot lands exactly on the grid and the error is zero. Listen to "As played" and "Quantised" in turn.

Watch the grid. If you played sixteenths and the grid is set to eighths, quantising drags some notes to the wrong place: each sixteenth goes to the nearest eighth, forwards or backwards. Set the example's grid to 1/8 and three notes out of fourteen leave their places. The grid should be no coarser than the shortest note you meant to play.

Now set the quantise strength to 50%. Each note travels only half the way to the grid: the errors are halved, but the character of the playing stays. If you were dragging a little behind, you still are, only more neatly. That is why DAWs give quantising a strength slider: the rhythm tightens up without turning mechanical.

The "Humanise" slider does the opposite: after quantising it shakes the notes loose again by a few random milliseconds. This is called humanising. Here the difference matters. Humanise gives random errors, and a live musician's errors are not random: they might lay the snare back a touch for a whole track, or push the kick. Compare for yourself: a strength of 60% with no humanise, and 100% with humanise. The first sounds like you, only tidier. The second sounds like a machine with the shakes.

Groove without quantising: J Dilla

The Detroit producer J Dilla (James Yancey, 1974–2006) made his beats on an Akai MPC3000 sampler and often switched its quantising off. His kick and snare sit slightly off the grid, and not in the same way: some drums swing, others run almost straight. That "drunk", laid-back feel influenced a whole generation of producers and drummers, who then learned to play like that on purpose. In 2014 his mother gave that MPC3000 to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Train your accuracy without quantising. The trainers page has a "Syncopation" level for reading rhythms from the page, and the rhythm game Beatline on this site builds its track from the rhythm and loudness of real songs: good practice for landing on the beat.

Next

You can now build a beat on a sixteen-cell drum machine, hear a backbeat and a syncopation, tell a straight rhythm from a swung one and know what 50, 66 and 75% mean on an MPC. You know what quantising does, why the grid should be no coarser than the shortest note, and why quantising has a strength below a hundred percent. And you have tapped three against two with both hands.

So far all the rhythm has been written on a single line, with no pitch in it. Time to spread the notes out by pitch, across the five lines of the staff. That is chapter 10.

The Notebook now has a drum track: the beat from this chapter's drum machine (the "To the Notebook" button), with its swing in percent, as on an MPC. The melody's piano roll has a "Quantise" button, which quantises what you played. In the next chapter the Notebook's melody appears on the staff.