In this third and last article about sixteenth-note quintuplets, I’ll show you how to apply the concepts and ideas of the previous lessons in a groove context. The first pattern consists to play the sixteenth-note quintuplets on the hi-hat (only with the right hand, without accents) playing the bass drum on the first and on the third beat, and the snare on 2 & 4.
For this pattern, I suggest different hi-hat accentuations, as shown in the figure below.
At a certain tempo range playing sixteenth-note quintuplets with one hand is very challenge, then we’ll play the previous pattern alternating the right hand and the left hand. The snare will fall on beats 2 & 4 with the left hand.
In the following video, I show you the previous two patterns and an additional groove, based on ghost notes and on a “swung” hi-hat, using a different sticking.
Now the final step is to read the pages of Reed’s Syncopation playing the melody of the exercises on the bass drum. The main thing is to maintain a steady groove, playing the sixteenth-note quintuplets on the hi-hat with the snare on 2 & 4, while the bass drum “swung”. Here are the first four bars of exercise one, pg.38. The tempo range suggested is 50 to 96 bpm, good work!
Here’s the PDF of the lesson.
If you are interested and want to know more about quintuplets, here are the previous lessons.
Quintuplets Lesson I
Here’s the first part of a series of lessons on sixteenth-note quintuplets, a group of five notes in the space of a quarter note. We start with…
Quintuplets Lesson Part 2
In the previous lesson. I shared some exercises to master quintuplets. In this second lesson, I show you a system to play and interpret the exercises…
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