Man, there’s just a whole lot of stuff besides blogging on my mind lately— like a Europe tour and recording project— so we may not see a lot of hugely substantive posts in the coming weeks. We’ll see. But here’s a pretty straightforward page of funk beats, or fragments of funk beats, based on paradiddles:

As you can see, we’re adding bass drum to the familiar inversions

played with the right hand on the hihat, and the left hand on the snare, and accenting on the beat. I play the right hand at a fairly even volume, with big dynamics in the left; playing the unaccented notes very softly, and the accented notes strongly.

Get the pdf

Some practice suggestions after the break:

After you get them down one measure at a time, combine measures to make a repeating four-beat pattern,  like so—here are the first two measures of the second line combined:

The sequence I use is 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, etc… 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, etc…, 3-4, 3-5, 3-6, etc— repeating each of those combinations many times before moving on to the next one.

In the course of running the combinations, I would also eliminate the bass drum on beat 1 of the second measure:

Probably it’s good practice to memorize the beats as you run them; read them the first time you play them, then look away from the page and play.