I’ve been transcribing and practising a few grooves recently, and thought it might be useful to people if I made the transcriptions available on here. If there’s a good response to these it might become a separate section of the site.
So here are a couple. The first is a Vinnie Colaiuta groove, taken from the legendary Chaka Khan rehearsal/soundcheck footage that continues to disappear and re-emerge on YouTube every few months. It’s a somewhat Garibaldi-esque beat that makes use of ghost notes and syncopation. The basic co-ordination of this groove is fairly difficult, but achieving the internal dynamics that make it sound as smooth as Vinnie is the real challenge.
The groove can be heard here, from 00:58.
The second is a beat from Drew Langan of The Drum Department YouTube channel. It’s a semi-linear groove that utilises the inverted double rudiment (as Langan explains in the video), as part of a constant stream of 16th notes. Again, the difficult part is making it flow – this one really has to be broken down and practised slowly to a click.
Hear it here throughout and also here at 4:13.
UPDATE – I finally got round to recording videos of these grooves, and here are the results:
Nice transcriptions but how do you tell where the ghost notes are?
Thanks for checking this out. Ghost notes are the unaccented notes on the snare. I thought this way would be easier to read than using loads of brackets!
Simon
Very nice. Please, keep on posting.