First things first - get your study guide here, and your (somewhat ironic, given the theme) transcription here.
I often struggle with two seemingly-conflicting facts:
Fact 1 - great drummers have been dancing ably over the drums, incorporating whatever’s necessary to pull off what they want to do, for nearly a century.
Fact 2 - systems for teaching what they do have lagged woefully behind.
That contradiction sometimes gives me the “cold water”/”pinch myself” feeling when I start thinking things like “finally, a grand unified theory of groove”.
The “cold water” voice goes “so hang on. Everyone from Papa Jo to Bonham to Stewart to Nate Smith just did what they did by accident? Or maybe somebody else thought of this.”
And people did/have.
Probably the closest thing to the system I’ll present today is Gary Chester’s New Breed, though Garibaldi’s Future Sounds plays with some of the concepts we could nest under the category I’m calling “texture”. Benny Greb and Jojo Mayer have likewise contributed some great stuff to the study of groove.
And I want to do a longer lesson about this soon - “how much drum instruction is really New” - but for today’s purposes, let’s just add a big caveat that if others have thought of this before me, or in parallel, that’s fine, and it’s to be expected.
With all that out of the way, however, I tended to feel both online and lessons like we teach groove like a series of individual factoids to learn. “Here’s a shuffle.” “Here’s a bossa.” When there are obviously more generalizable concepts at work just beneath the surface, and if we just learned those we’d be able to own the generator rather than the output.
(Or, to put another way, we don’t teach adults language by asking them to memorize thousands of individual sentences. We have structures like grammar and verb cases which, if you learn them, give you access to thousands of individual output instances.)
Ok, but why do we care, besides “Nate went in the garage and made a thing.”
Because when we approach groove like a transcription exercise, we’re “trapped” in the loop. If we stay in it, we feel restricted. And if we try to “break out”, the groove gets sloppy, or the timing suffers.
Very simple example: how many of us learned 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover? How many of us could improvise, using theme-and-variation of that groove, inventing new loops every few bars, as Steve Gadd could no-doubt do in his sleep?
Or watch Keith Carlock play. Even with Steely Dan or Paul Simon, he’s rarely repeating the exact 2-bar loop. But in more “loose” settings like with Wayne Krantz, he’s flowing improvisationally the whole time, never losing the groove.
Don’t you want to be able to do that?
Great.
The solution starts with how we absorb groove. It’s not “rock”, “half-time rock”, “Purdie shuffle”.
It’s special cases of some broad concepts. And they’re not even that hard to figure out. I’ve chosen 4 - Grid, Snare Placement, Texture, and What Can Move - but that’s just one potential taxonomy.
What’s more important is internalizing some taxonomy, and using that to fuel your practice.
“Grid: straight 8th/Snare Placement: “3”/Texture: 8ths on hat/What Can Move: kick drum” delivers us quickly to what I call a “beat improv” exercise with a half time rock beat.
And you could use this like a “spin the wheel”/slot machine to make sure you’re hitting all the important, commonly-occurring categories, and that’s already way more helpful than “just memorizing”, but the even deeper application is internalizing or memorizing some version of this system to help you generate exercises.
For instance, the “texture” category allows things like “broken straight 16th” grooves, and by allowing “kick” to move independently, you might discover either that most of the ideas you come up with are boring, or that the coordination challenge of learning every possible permutation way exceeds how many idiomatic ways to phrase you need, so you make the kick placement “inter-dependent” with the lead hand.
These are just some of the directions this approach can send you, but notice that we’re now speaking in high-leverage terms, RAM-ing generators that can produce hundreds of individual loops, and baking in that variability to practice rather than memorizing individual grooves.
This is just the beginning of my exploration of this space, but I think you’ll find this initial foray useful.