Lesson 5: Sixteenth-note kick patterns

Every beat so far has had the kick on the beats or halfway between them. The moment you put a kick note in the gaps between those, on a sixteenth, a beat stops being square and starts to groove. Almost every rock and pop beat you love does it somewhere.

Watch first

Counting sixteenths

Four notes per beat: “one e and a, two e and a, three e and a, four e and a”. Say it out loud, slowly, tapping the “one, two, three, four” on your leg. The “e” is just after the beat, the “and” halfway, the “a” just before the next beat. The count under every staff on this page is exactly that.

Pattern one: the “a” of two

Money beat, plus a kick on the “a” of two, the sixteenth right before beat three. The hi-hat stays on eighths; the extra kick lands between two hat notes, on its own. Play it slowly enough that you can say “a” as you play it.

▶ Play72 BPM−5+5

Pattern two: the “e” of three

Now the kick on the “e” of three, the sixteenth right after beat three. Notice the difference in feel: the “a” pushes into the next beat, the “e” bounces off the one before.

▶ Play72 BPM−5+5

Pattern three: both

Both extra kicks. This one is on hundreds of records.

▶ Play72 BPM−5+5

The one fault everyone has

The hi-hat hand flinches when the kick plays between its notes. The cure is dull and it works: play the hat and kick without the snare, at 60, for two minutes, until the foot can move without the hand knowing about it.

Practise

Set the tempo trainer to 70 with the subdivision on sixteenths, so you can hear the “e” and the “a” clicking. Play pattern one until it is boring, then two, then three. Then turn the subdivision off and see whether the kicks still land where they should. Make up a fourth pattern of your own in the lab, one kick moved, and play that too.