funk – NYU Music Experience Design Lab

Groove challenges with the Groove Pizza

One of our key design principles at the NYU MusEDLab is not to confront beginners with a blank canvas. We want to introduce people to our tools by giving them specific, real-world music to play around with. That was the motivation behind creating presets for the aQWERTYon, and a similar impulse informs Ableton’s approach to their online music tutorials. The Groove Pizza comes with some preset patterns (specials), but there aren’t direct prompts for creative beatmaking. This post introduces some prototype prompts.

The Funky Drummer boom-bap challenge

The pattern below is the first quarter note of the kick and snare pattern in Clyde Stubblefield’s classic drum break. Fill in the missing kick and snare hits to make your own golden age breakbeat. Try removing some hi-hats as well.

Musical inspiration:

The Levee break asymmetrical kick challenge

The groove below uses the kick and snare pattern from “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin. Add hi-hats and customize the kick and snare to best convey the Awesome Majesty of Rock.

Musical inspiration:

Four-on-the-floor squares challenge

These two squares make a classic dance beat, kicks on the quarter notes with hi-hats in between. Add snares and break up the symmetry to make a dance floor filler.

Musical inspiration:

So Fresh So Clean challenge

The pattern below is the basis for a sixteenth note hip-hop groove. Place more kicks and snares to make a crunk Dirty South beat in the spirit of OutKast.

Musical inspiration:

It’s A Trap challenge

The pattern below is the basis for a thirty-second note groove. Add kicks and snares and remove hi-hats to make a radio-friendly trap beat.

Musical inspiration: I would include a link to a Future song but can’t find one that whose lyrics aren’t extremely objectionable. Just turn on the radio.

Deconstructing the bassline in Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”

If you have even a passing interest in funk, you will want to familiarize yourself with Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” And if you are preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the movement of the hips, then the bassline needs to be a cornerstone of your practice.

Here’s a transcription I did in Noteflight – huge props to them for recently introducing sixteenth note swing.

And here’s how it looks in the MIDI piano roll:

The “Chameleon” bassline packs an incredible amount of music into just two bars. To understand how it’s put together, it’s helpful to take a look at the scale that Herbie built the tune around, the B-flat Dorian mode. Click the image below to play it on the aQWERTYon. I recommend doing some jamming with it over the song before you move on.

Fun fact: this scale contains the same pitches as A-flat major. If you find that fact confusing, then feel free to ignore it. You can learn more about scales and modes in my Soundfly course.

The chord progression

The opening section of “Chameleon” is an endless loop of two chords, B♭-7 and E♭7. You build both of them using the notes in B-flat Dorian. To make B♭-7, start on the root of the scale, B-flat. Skip over the second scale degree to land on the third, D-flat. Skip over the fourth scale degree to land on the fifth, F. Then skip over the sixth to land on the seventh, A-flat. If you want to add extensions to the chord, just keep skipping scale degrees, like so:

To make E♭7, you’re going to use the same seven pitches in the same order, but you’re going to treat E-flat as home base rather than B-flat. You could think of this new scale as being E-flat Mixolydian, or B-flat Dorian starting on E-flat; they’re perfectly interchangeable. Click to play E-flat Mixolydian on the aQWERTYon. You build your E♭7 chord like so:

Once you’ve got the sound of B♭-7 and E♭7 in your head, let’s try an extremely simplified version of the bassline.

Chord roots only

At the most basic level, the “Chameleon” bassline exists to spell out the chord progression in a rhythmically interesting way. (This is what all basslines do.) Here’s a version of the bassline that removes all of the notes except the ones on the first beat of each bar. They play the roots of the chords, B-flat and E-flat.

That’s boring, but effective. You can never go wrong playing chord roots on the downbeat.

Simple arpeggios

Next, we’ll hear a bassline that plays all of the notes in B♭-7 and E♭7 one at a time. When you play chords in this way, they’re called arpeggios.

The actual arpeggios

The real “Chameleon” bassline plays partial arpeggios–they don’t have all of the notes from each chord. Also, the rhythm is a complicated and interesting one.

Below, you can explore the rhythm in the Groove Pizza. The orange triangle shows the rhythm of the arpeggio notes, played on the snare. The yellow quadrilateral shows the rhythm of the walkups, played on the kick–we’ll get to those below.

The snare rhythm has a hit every three sixteenth notes. It’s a figure known in Afro-Latin music as tresillo, which you hear absolutely everywhere in all styles of American popular and vernacular music. Tresillo also forms the front half of the equally ubiquitous son clave. (By the way, you can also use the Groove Pizza to experiment with the “Chameleon” drum pattern.)

As for the pitches: Instead of going root-third-fifth-seventh, the bassline plays partial arpeggios. The figure over B♭-7 is just the root, seventh and root again, while the one over E♭7 is the root, fifth and seventh.

Adding the walkups

Now let’s forget about the arpeggios for a minute and go back to just playing the chord roots on the downbeats. The bassline walks up to each of these notes via the chromatic scale, that is, every pitch on the piano keyboard.

Chromatic walkups are a great way to introduce some hip dissonance into your basslines, because they can include notes that aren’t in the underlying scale. In “Chameleon” the walkups include A natural and D natural. Both of these notes sound really weird if you sustain them over B-flat Dorian, but in the context of the walkup they sound perfectly fine.

Putting it all together

The full bassline consists of the broken arpeggios anticipated by the walkups.

If you’re a guitarist or bassist, you can play this without even shifting position. Use your index on the third fret, your middle on the fourth fret, your ring on the fifth fret, and your pinkie on the sixth fret.

              .          . .
G|----------.-3----------3-6--|
D|----------6-----------------|
A|---------------3-4-5-6------|
E|--3-4-5-6-------------------|

If you’ve got this under your fingers, maybe you’d like to figure out the various keyboard and horn parts. They aren’t difficult, but you’ll need one more scale, the B-flat blues scale. Click the image to jam with it over the song and experience how great it sounds.

There you have it, one of the cornerstones of funk. Good luck getting it out of your head!

Freedom ’90

Since George Michael died, I’ve been enjoying all of his hits, but none of them more than this one. Listening to it now, it’s painfully obvious how much it’s about George Michael’s struggles with his sexual orientation. I wonder whether he was being deliberately coy in the lyrics, or if he just wasn’t yet fully in touch with his identity. Being gay in the eighties must have been a nightmare.

This is the funkiest song that George Michael ever wrote, which is saying something. Was he the funkiest white British guy in history? Quite possibly.

The beat

There are five layers to the drum pattern: a simple closed hi-hat from a drum machine, some programmed bongos and congas, a sampled tambourine playing lightly swung sixteenth notes, and finally, once the full groove kicks in, the good old Funky Drummer break. I include a Noteflight transcription of all that stuff below, but don’t listen to it, it sounds comically awful.

George Michael uses the Funky Drummer break on at least two of the songs on Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1. Hear him discuss the break and how it informed his writing process in this must-watch 1990 documentary.

The intro and choruses

Harmonically, this is a boilerplate C Mixolydian progression: the chords built on the first, seventh and fourth degrees of the scale. You can hear the same progression in uncountably many classic rock songs.

For a more detailed explanation of this scale and others like it, check out Theory For Producers.

The rhythm is what makes this groove so fresh. It’s an Afro-Cuban pattern full of syncopation and hemiola. Here’s an abstraction of it on the Groove Pizza. If you know the correct name of this rhythm, please tell me in the comments!

The verses

There’s a switch to plain vanilla C major, the chords built on the fifth, fourth and root of the scale.

Like the chorus, this is standard issue pop/rock harmonically speaking, but it also gets its life from a funky Latin rhythm. It’s a kind of clave pattern, five hits spread more or less evenly across the sixteen sixteenth notes in the bar. Here it is on the Groove Pizza.

The prechorus and bridge

This section unexpectedly jumps over to C minor, and now things get harmonically interesting. The chords are built around a descending chromatic bassline: C, B, B-flat, A. It’s a simple idea but with complicated implications, because it implies four chords built on three different scales between them. First, we have the tonic triad in C natural minor, no big deal there. Next comes the V chord in C harmonic minor. Then we’re back to C natural minor, but with the seventh in the bass. Finally, we go to the IV chord in C Dorian mode. Really, all that we’re doing is stretching C natural minor to accommodate a couple of new notes, B natural in the second chord, and A natural in the fourth one.

The rhythm here is similar but not identical to the clave-like pattern in the verse–the final chord stab is a sixteenth note earlier. See and hear it on the Groove Pizza.

I don’t have the time to transcribe the whole bassline, but it’s absurdly tight and soulful. The album credits list bass played both by Deon Estus and by George Michael himself. Whichever one of them laid this down, they nailed it.

Song structure

“Freedom ’90” has an exceedingly peculiar structure for a mainstream pop song. The first chorus doesn’t hit until almost two minutes in, which is an eternity–most pop songs are practically over that that point. The graphic below shows the song segments as I marked them in Ableton.

The song begins with a four bar instrumental intro, nothing remarkable about that. But then it immediately moves into an eight bar section that I have trouble classifying. It’s the spot that would normally be occupied by verse one, but this part uses the chorus harmony and is different from the other verses. I labeled it “intro verse” for lack of a better term. (Update: upon listening again, I realized that this section is the backing vocals from the back half of the chorus. Clever, George Michael!) Then there’s an eight bar instrumental break, before the song has really even started. George Michael brings you on board with this unconventional sequence because it’s all so catchy, but it’s definitely strange.

Finally, twenty bars in, the song settles into a more traditional verse-prechorus-chorus loop. The verses are long, sixteen bars. The prechorus is eight bars, and the chorus is sixteen. You could think of the chorus as being two eight bar sections, the part that goes “All we have to do…” and the part that goes “Freedom…” but I hear it as all one big section.

After two verse-prechorus-chorus units, there’s a four bar breakdown on the prechorus chord progression. This leads into sixteen bar bridge, still following the prechorus form. Finally, the song ends with a climactic third chorus, which repeats and fades out as an outtro. All told, the song is over six minutes. That’s enough time (and musical information) for two songs by a lesser artist.

A word about dynamics: just from looking at the audio waveform, you can see that “Freedom ’90” has very little contrast in loudness and fullness over its duration. It starts sparse, but once the Funky Drummer loop kicks in at measure 13, the sound stays constantly big and full until the breakdown and bridge. These sections are a little emptier without the busy piano part. The final chorus is a little bigger than the rest of the song because there are more vocals layered in, but that still isn’t a lot of contrast. I guess George Michael decided that the groove was so hot, why mess with it by introducing contrast for the sake of contrast? He was right to feel that way.

Visualizing trap beats with the Groove Pizza

In a previous post, I used the Groove Pizza to visualize some classic hip-hop beats. But the kids are all about trap beats right now, which work differently from the funk-based boom-bap of my era.

From the dawn of jazz until about 1960, African-American popular music was based on an eighth note pulse. The advent of funk brought with it a shift to the sixteenth note pulse. Now we’re undergoing another shift, as Southern hip-hop is moving the rest of popular music over to a 32nd note pulse. The tempos have been slowing down as the beat subdivisions get finer. This may all seem like meaningless abstraction, but the consequences become real if you want to program beats of your own.

Back in the 90s, the template for a hip-hop beat looked like a planet of 16th notes orbited by kicks and snares. Click the image below to hear a simple “planet funk” pattern in the Groove Pizza. Each slice of the pizza is a sixteenth note, and the whole pizza is one bar long.

(Music readers can also view it in Noteflight.)

You can hear the sixteenth note hi-hat pulse clearly in “So Fresh So Clean” by OutKast.

View in Noteflight

Trap beats have the same basic skeleton as older hip-hop styles: a kick on beat one, snares on beats two and four, and hi-hats on some or all of the beats making up the underlying pulse. However, in trap, that pulse is twice as fast as in 90s hip-hop, 32nd notes rather than sixteenths. This poses an immediate practical problem: a lot of drum machines don’t support such a fine grid resolution. For example, the interface of the ubiquitous TR-808 is sixteen buttons, one for each sixteenth note. On the computer, it’s less of an issue because you can set the grid resolution to be whatever you want, but even so, 32nd notes are a hassle. So what do you do?

The trap producer’s workaround is to double the song tempo, thereby turning sixteenths into effective 32nds. To get a trap beat at 70 beats per minute, you set the tempo to 140. Your 808 grid becomes half a bar of 32nd notes, rather than a full bar of sixteenths. And instead of putting your snares on beats two and four, you put them on beat three.

Here’s a generic trap beat I made. Each pizza slice is a 32nd note, and the whole pizza is half a bar.

View in Noteflight

Trap beats don’t use swing. Instead, they create rhythmic interest through syncopation, accenting unexpected weak beats. On the Groove Pizza, the weak beats are the ones in between the north, south, east and west. Afro-Cuban music is a good source of syncopated patterns. The snare pattern in the last quarter of my beat is a rotation of son clave, and the kick pattern is somewhat clave-like as well.

Now let’s take a look at two real-life trap beats. First, there’s the inescapable “Trap Queen” by Fetty Wap.

Here’s a simplified version of the beat. (“Trap Queen” uses a few 64th notes on the hi-hat, which you can’t yet do on the Groove Pizza.)

View in Noteflight

The beat has an appealing symmetry. In each half bar, both the kick and snare each play a strong beat and a weak beat. The hi-hat pattern is mostly sixteenth notes, with just a few thirty-second notes as embellishments. The location of those embellishments changes from one half-bar to the next. It’s a simple technique, and it’s effective.

My other real-world example is “Panda” by Desiigner.

Here’s the beat on the GP, once again simplified a bit.

View in Noteflight

Unlike my generic trap beat, “Panda” doesn’t have any hi-hats on the 32nd notes at all. It feels more like an old-school sixteenth note pulse at a very slow tempo. The really “trappy” part comes at the very end, with a quick pair of kick drums on the last two 32nd notes. While the lawn-sprinkler effect of doubletime hi-hats has become a cliche, doubletime kick rolls are still startlingly fresh (at least to my ears.)

To make authentic trap beats, you’ll need a more full-featured tool than the Groove Pizza. For one thing, you need 64th notes and triplets. Also, trap isn’t just about the placement of the drum hits, it’s about specific sounds. In addition to closed hi-hats, you need open hi-hats and crash cymbals. You want more than one snare or handclap, and maybe multiple kicks too. And you’d want to be able to alter the pitch of your drums too. The best resource to learn more, as always, is the music itself.

Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza

We created the Groove Pizza to make it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next step is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I’ll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or alter it as you see fit. I’ve also included Noteflight transcriptions of the beats.

The Backbeat Cross

View in Noteflight

This simple pattern is the basis of just about all rock and roll: kicks on beats one and three (north and south), and snares on beats two and four (east and west.) It’s boring, but it’s a solid foundation that you can build more musical-sounding grooves on top of.

The Big Beat

View in Noteflight

This Billy Squier classic is Number nine on WhoSampled’s list of Top Ten Most Sampled Breakbeats. There are only two embellishments to the backbeat cross: the snare drum hit to the east is anticipated by a kick a sixteenth note (one slice) earlier, and the kick drum to the south is anticipated by a kick an eighth note (two slices) earlier. It isn’t much, but together with some light swing, it’s enough to make for a compelling rhythm. The groove is interestingly close to being symmetrical on the right side of the circle, and there’s an antisymmetry with the kick-free left side. That balance between symmetry and asymmetry is what makes for satisfying music.

Planet Funk (eighth notes)

View in Noteflight

This pattern reminds me of Saturn viewed edge-on. The hi-hats are the planet itself, the snares are the rings, and the lone kick drum at the top is a moon. To make the simplest funk beats, all you need to do is add more moons into the kick drum orbit.

It’s A New Day

View in Noteflight

The Skull Snaps song isn’t too well known, but the break that kicks it off is number five on the WhoSampled list. The Planet Funk template has some extra kick drums embellishing particular beats. The kick on the downbeat (the topmost slice) has a kick anticipating it a sixteenth note (one slice) earlier, and another following it an eighth note (two slices) later. The snare drum hit to the west is anticipated by two more kicks. All that activity is balanced by the southeast half of the pizza, which is totally kick-free. Like “The Big Beat,” “It’s A New Day” is close to being symmetrical, with just enough variation to keep it interesting.

When The Levee Breaks

View in Noteflight

This Led Zeppelin classic embodies the a wesome majesty of rock. Rhythmically, though, it has more in common with funk. The crucial difference is beat three, the southernmost point on the pizza. In rock, you usually have a kick there. In funk, you usually don’t. The Levee break has a kick a sixteenth note before beat three, which is quite a surprise. Try moving that kick a slice later, and you’ll hear the groove lose its tension and interest. Like “It’s A New Day,” the Levee break sets up the second snare hit with two kicks. There’s another interesting wrinkle, too, a kick that immediately follows the first one. The result is another symmetrically asymmetrical drum pattern.

Planet Funk (sixteenth notes)

View in Noteflight

If you put a hi-hat on every slice of the pizza, you get a busier version of the basic funk groove. With twice as many hi-hats, you can slow the tempo down and still have an energetic feel.

So Fresh, So Clean

View in Noteflight

This OutKast banger has a fascinating drum machine pattern. The snare and hi-hat stick to the Planet Funk pattern above, but against all this predictable symmetry, the kick drum is all over the place. To understand what’s going on here, you need to know something about the concept of strong and weak beats. Strong beats are where you expect drum hits to fall, and weak beats are where you don’t expect them. The more times you have to divide the circle in half to get to a given beat, the weaker it is. The weakest beats are the even-numbered pizza slices. In the first bar, pictured above, every single even-numbered slice has a kick on it. This is, to put it mildly, not typical. Usually the base of your beat is stable and predictable, and the higher-pitched ornaments are more unpredictable. That’s what makes “So Fresh, So Clean” so cool.

Nas Is Like

View in Noteflight

While this track is best known for its samples, and deservedly so, the underlying drum machine rhythm is pretty remarkable too. Like the OutKast song above, the snares and hi-hats are mostly stable, with most of the variation in the kick. I won’t verbally analyze all four bars of the pattern, but if you play with it, you’ll see the idea of balanced symmetry and asymmetry at work.

Amen Break

View in Noteflight

The Amen break is the most complex rhythm here, and it’s a post unto itself to really explain the whole thing. The important thing is to compare the simplicity of the hi-hatsadditional sound, an open hi-hat in the last bar. Displacement!