Jeff Porcaro Archives

February 16, 2018August 28, 2018

All About Groove – Demonstrating 5 Different Types Of Swing

Along with beat placement, dynamics, and tones, the amount of swing in a groove is an element that has a tremendous affect on how a groove sounds and feels. When we first learn about swing, we tend to categorize a feel as either “swing” or “straight”, where a “straight” feel means all 8^th notes or 16^th notes (depending on the groove) have an equal space between them, and a “swing” feel means the notes that land on the &’s should line up with the 3^rd note of the triplet subdivision. I think a lot of us learn swing this way because, truly, it’s a great way to teach that feel. However, as you advance as a player it’s crucial to understand there are actually different types of swing, and you should be able to recognize how they each impart a different vibe. While 8th note swing is crucial to jazz swing and blues shuffles, 16th note swing really shines in backbeat-based grooves. I chose to focus on the often overlooked 16th note swing groove.

I’m going to demonstrate 5 different swing feels, from straightest to swingest and point to some songs you can check out to hear these feels in context. Below each feel category is a YouTube playlist with some of my favorite songs and drummers demonstrating different 16th note feels.

Here’s the basic groove I’m using in the video. There’s an 8th note hi hat pattern in the first 4 bars, then a short fill into a 16th-note hi hat pattern. Aside from some embellishments, the kick and snare stay the same throughout. Notice how the 8th notes on the hi hat in the first 4 bars don’t reveal the swing feel. This is because the 16th notes define the feel in this groove. Only the kick and snare notes that land on 16th note subdivisions (“e” and “a”) reveal the swing feel until the hi hat only goes to 16th notes. The key is to develop consistency through practice and really get comfortable with a feel before you bust it out on a gig. If you can’t hold these feels consistently throughout a song, you run the risk of sounding like you don’t know what you’re doing. Believe me, I’ve been there.

1. No Swing

This is pretty self-explanatory. The spacing between the 16th notes is perfectly even or very close to even.

Note, however, that a human drummer playing a straight 16th groove can still feel a lot different than a drum machine playing the same groove. Compare the drum machine groove on The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” with Jeff Porcaro’s groove on Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown”, and you’ll appreciate the differences. Although the patterns are almost identical, the two grooves feel very different. There’s a stiffness to the hi hat 16ths that works in “Don’t You Want Me”, but probably wouldn’t work as well in “Lowdown”. The kick and snare in “Don’t You Wan’t Me” are right on the beat, while Porcaro lays the snare back for a wider pocket. The point is, there’s more to the concept of feel than simply the amount of swing. Fun fact, “Don’t You Want Me” was actually the first song featuring the Linn LM-1 drum machine to go to Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

2. Loose Straight

This particular feel fascinates me, and drummers don’t seem to talk about it much. I call it Loose Straight because it’s useful when you want to loosen your straight groove with a little hint of swing. You want to play a 16^th groove, but put a little sauce on it, so to speak. The result is a mostly straight feel that doesn’t come across as stiff. It can be useful in the folk/Americana/classic RnB world where there usually aren’t as many programmed elements in the music and more room for a human feel. It’s also all over classic rock thanks to drummers like Ringo Starr, Levon Helm, Jim Keltner, and Jim Gordon.

If you just listen to one song from the playlist below, check out Jim Keltner’s playing on John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love”. I’ll deviate here from the 16th note discussion because it’s such a good example of Loose Straight. The tambourine is playing an 8th note pattern that defines the feel of the track – not quite swing, definitely not straight, and grooving as hell!

The conga part in “What’s Goin On” is another great demonstration of Loose Straight. In the live version I posted in the playlist, there’s a piano and conga breakdown between 4:00 and 6:30 where you can really hear the Loose Straight 16th note subdivisions in Eddie “Bongo” Brown’s conga part.

3. In The Crack

This type of feel on a drumset, at least in a funk context, may have originated in New Orleans, with drummers like Zigaboo Modeliste and Johnny Vidacovich, fusing parade beats and Mardi Gras Indian rhythms with jazz. The result is a super greasy, dirty sounding groove. It’s a little looser than James Brown or Motown funk, but it’s not quite a triplet shuffle. People also use words like “swampy” and “slinky” to describe this feel.

4. Triplet Swing

As I touched on above, Triplet Swing is the type of swing most of us learn first, albeit in an 8th note context. If you play an 8th note shuffle, but put the backbeat on 3, you get a half-time shuffle, also called a 16th note shuffle. Notes that land on the “e” and “a” beats should line up with the 3^rd note of an imaginary 16th note triplet. If you fill in the middle triplet subdivisions with ghost notes on the snare you get what’s known as the Purdie Shuffle, played by Bernard Purdie on Steely Dan’s “Home At Last” and “Babylon Sisters”. Variations of the Purdie shuffle were played by John Bonham on “Fool In The Rain” and Jeff Porcaro on “Rosanna”. The evenness of the triplet subdivisions gives this feel a rolling quality. Check out how triplet fills always work in this feel because the groove is based on triplets. Mitch Mitchell’s playing on “Little Wing” is a great example.

5. Tight Swing

Lastly, if you take Triplet Swing and compress the shuffle a little bit, you get what I call Tight Swing. In other words, the “e” and “a” beats are pushed closer to the next downbeat. The pattern approaches a doted 16^th note, followed by a 32^nd note, but it’s not quite that tight. Check out the skip beats on the bass drum in Questlove’s groove on D’Angelo’s “Devil’s Pie” and Brian McLeod’s groove on Ziggy Marley’s “True To Myself”.

In my next post, I’ll go into detail about how I practice these different swing feels. Stay tuned!

October 22, 2014January 24, 2016

All About Groove – How To Practice Backbeat Placement

(Demo videos coming soon! ….)

First thing to realize is your groove will never sound exacly like Keltner’s or JR’s or anyone else’s. That’s what’s beautiful about playing an instrument. I feel it’s ok to imitate your heros if it helps you learn a new skill. Eventually, with enough practice, you’ll internalize this feel and be able to access it automatically when your musical intuition tells you to go there.

But first you need to paint the fence, wash the car, do whatever else Mr. Miyagi tells you to do. It will make sense later. You need to train your body to be comfortable with it and with enough practice you’ll notice the subtle seasoning in your playing, and so will others.

Before you start, record yourself playing a simple “Billy Jean” type groove with 1 and 3 on the kick and 2 and 4 on the snare with an 8^th note hi hat to a click. Don’t try to lay anything back, just aim for the middle of the beat. Record 8 bars or so of this. You’ll use this as a baseline to mark your progress.

To help you get cozy with a late backbeat I’m going to use a familiar rudiment, the flam. Your goal is to be able to control just how late your backbeat lands and keep it from shifting.

Grab your practice pad and a metronome. For right handed drummers, play left hand accent flams on 2 and 4, resting on the other beats. The practice pad will help you hear the click better. Find a volume for your metronome such that your left hand accent is about the same volume as the click. This is crucial. Make the grace note land on the beat and the accent follow it. Play around with the tightness of the flam. Start with a unison flam (both hands hit the pad at the same time) and gradually open it until the accent is all the way to the &, then gradually move back to a unison flam. Do this over the course of 16 bars or so. Find a slow tempo that’s comfortable. Use an 8^th note click if it helps you stay in time. Be careful not to let the grace note shift from the click.

When you’re ready add ¼ notes on your right hand on 1 and 3. Keep them low like your flam grace note. You want to be able to clearly hear the relationship between the click and the left hand accent. You now have a quarter note groove emerging with a backbeat on 2 and 4. Again, vary the tightness of the flam all the way to the & and back over 16 bars.

Now go to 8^th notes with the right hand. Notice that when you start the 16 bar phrase, you have a unison flam on 2 & 4. Around bar 8 when your left hand accent reaches the & you’ll have a unison flam on the & of 2 and the & of 4.

Once you’re comfortable with the above exercises, pick a flam tightness that feels good and try some different tempos, keeping the flam tightness consistent. Listen to how the accent lands just after the click on 2 and 4. Get comfortable with this. Be careful not to let your right hand get behind the beat.

When you’re feeling good on the pad, move to the kit. Do the above exercises with your right hand on the hi hat and left hand on the snare.

Now, with the click running, stop playing the hi hat. Just play the snare with your left hand. Notice how you can consistently play your snare just behind the click. See how long you can hold it there. When you get off, put your right hand back in to help guide you.

Here’s the thing, this flam business is just an exercise to get you cozy with the late backbeat. You don’t really want any flaming between your hi hat and snare in your groove. Experiment with shifting your right hand a little later on beats 2 and 4 so that it lands in unison with your left hand. You’re effectively stretching beats 1 and 3 slightly longer than a ¼ note and shortening beats 2 and 4 to slightly under a ¼ note to catch up to the next downbeat.

Record yourself performing Step 8 and compare with your initial recording. Do you hear a difference in your pocket?

October 22, 2014May 13, 2016

All About Groove – 6 Drummers That Inspired Me To Work On My Beat Placement

In my last post, I posed the question, what is groove? Now that we’ve identified the key ingredients in a great groove, I want to explore one of these ingredients in more depth – beat placement. On a few occasions, I’ve had people ask me, “Hey can you lay that backbeat back a little?” To which I thought, well…I don’t know. Just the backbeat? And leave everything else on the beat? Sure, on a good day I can play ahead, on the beat, or behind if I want, but I’ve never tried doing more than one at once. And how the heck would I practice that? That sounds hard.

This comment changed how I think about Groove. Up until then, I’d always practiced with the goal of burying the click on every quarter note, making sure my quarter notes were quarter notes and my eighth notes were eighth notes and every kick and snare note lined up with my hi hat, like I’d been taught. I never realized different voices in the kit could be on top, on the beat, or behind relative to other voices in the kit in the same groove. I started listening to some of my heros, and I found this common thread in their grooves. In many cases, there was indeed a slight anticipation before the backbeat!

I tried it. I was hard. And then, a breakthrough happened.

But. before we get into how, let’s explore who, what, why, and where. I made a Spotify playlist with some examples of tracks where the drummer is laying the backbeat back and some comments on the drummers that popularized this feel.

Jim Keltner

I was recording with some people recently, and the topic came up of keeping the bass drum right on the beat and the snare behind the beat. The producer told me people used to call this feel “California Swing” because of Keltner’s use of it on so many LA sessions that it became associated with the California sound during the 70’s and 80’s. If you’re looking to study Keltner’s drumming, Sergej Randelovic-Runjo’s Jim Keltner Discography is an excellent resource. For now, check out “Fool Who Knows” by Little Village, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan, and “Shangri-La” by Don Henley.

Steve Ferrone

I love Steve Ferrone’s playing with Tom Petty, especially on the Wildflowers album. “Honey Bee” is probably the most drastic example of the late backbeat on the playlist, so it’s a good example to start with to identify what I’m talking about.

John Robinson

JR’s groove on Steve Winwood’s “Take It As It Comes” is great example of his unique lope. When I listen to JR, I can’t help but picture an egg rolling end-over-end. It’s asymmetrical, yet so consistent it becomes hypnotic. Could this be why he played on so many dance tracks in the 80’s? (Side note, isn’t in amazing that real human drummers used to play on dance tracks? Human people like James Gadson, Tony Thompson, and JR.)

Speaking of James Gadson…

James Gadson

A master of the 16th note hi hat groove, Gadson set the bar for R&B drumming in the 60’s and 70’s. Listen to the beat placement on Bill Withers’ “Use Me”, but also check out the pocket on “If You Think You’re Lonely Now”, which was a hit in 1981 off Bobby Womack’s album The Poet.

Jeff Porcaro

A busy LA session player from the mid 70’s to early 90’s who died young, Jeff Porcaro left behind a massive legacy of groove. One aspect of Jeff’s playing I love is his ability to put the backbeat in exactly the right place for the song. My favorite example is “Luck Of The Draw”, the title track off Bonnie Raitt’s 1991 album. Jeff is 100% inside the song. Also check out Springsteen’s “Human Touch” and Toto’s “Without Your Love”.

All songs mentioned:

Now on to the business of HOW TO PRACTICE THIS FEEL…