Jazz Piano for Classical Players

Lesson 13: A drum machine as your band

Goal: program four jazz grooves on a drum machine and practise your comping and soloing against them.

Why bother

A metronome clicking on 2 and 4 (Lesson 5) is good. A drummer is better: it gives you the swing feel to lock into, and it makes practice a lot more fun. iReal Pro does this with bass too, but if you own a drum machine, you can build exactly the groove you want and sit it at the tempo you need.

This lesson assumes you can already program a beat step by step. If you have one of these machines, the other courses on this site cover the basics:

• Korg Volca Beats: programming your first beat and active step (for the loop length trick below)
• Roland TR-08: programming in step write and shuffle and pre-scale

Most other drum machines and groove apps work the same way.

The problem: drum machines don’t swing

A drum machine’s 16 steps are even sixteenth notes. Jazz eighth notes are long-short, closer to a triplet (Lesson 5). There are three ways round it:

Setting up a triplet grid

• TR-08: set PRE-SCALE to position 1 (each step becomes an eighth-note triplet), clear the pattern, and set the length to 12 steps (CLEAR + step 12). TEMPO then reads the real tempo.
• Volca Beats: it has no triplet or swing setting, but you can fake one. Use active step to switch off steps 13 to 16, giving a 12-step loop, and treat every 3 steps as one beat. Because the Volca still thinks each step is a sixteenth, set TEMPO to three quarters of the tempo you want: for a swing at 120, set 90; for 160, set 120. For slow ballads you may need the full tempo range (global setting 5, TP.FL).

Groove 1: Medium swing (triplet grid)

The classic jazz ride cymbal pattern: “ding, ding-a, ding, ding-a”. The “a” is the last triplet of beats 2 and 4, leading into the next beat. The hi-hat closes on 2 and 4, and the kick drum barely plays (jazz drummers “feather” it, very softly on every beat, or leave it out).

Sounds to use:

• TR-08: ride on CY (TONE up, DECAY short to medium so it ticks rather than crashes), hi-hat on CH, kick on BD with LEVEL low and DECAY short. Write AC on steps 4 and 10 so the ride leans on 2 and 4.
• Volca Beats: there’s no ride, so use Closed Hat with CLOSED DECAY turned up for a bit of sizzle. Put Claves on 2 and 4 (it sounds like a drummer’s cross-stick), and drop the Kick’s PART LEVEL right down.

For variety, make a B pattern with a light snare “comp” on step 12 (the “a” of 4), and switch between them every four bars.

Use it for: the blues in F (Lesson 8), “Autumn Leaves” (Lesson 11), anything marked “swing”. Medium swing sits around 110 to 160.

Groove 2: Bossa nova (16 steps, straight)

Bossa nova comes from Brazil in the late 1950s, and it’s played with straight, even eighths. No swing needed, so both machines handle it perfectly. The kick plays a heartbeat “dum, da-dum” and the rim plays the bossa clave rhythm.

• TR-08: rim on RS, hat on CH, kick on BD with a short DECAY.
• Volca Beats: rim on Claves, hat on Closed Hat, Kick with DECAY short.

Keep the hats quiet. Tempo about 120 to 140. Use it for “Blue Bossa” (Lesson 14), and try “Autumn Leaves” as a bossa for a change.

Groove 3: Ballad (triplet grid, slow)

Ballads are mostly space. On a real kit this would be brushes; a drum machine can’t do brushes, so keep it sparse and soft.

Tempo about 55 to 75 (on the Volca, remember the three-quarters rule: 42 to 56). Turn all the levels down and let the piano breathe. Use it for “Summertime” or any slow tune from Lesson 12.

Groove 4: Jazz-funk (16 steps, straight)

The 1960s Blue Note sound of Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” and “Watermelon Man”: straight eighths, a funky kick and a backbeat.

Tempo about 100 to 115. This is the place for quartal chords and So What voicings (Lesson 10), vamping on one or two chords.

Playing with your drum machine

• Keep it quiet. The drums are there to give you time and feel, not to drown the piano.
• No fills, or very few. A busy drum loop gets tiring fast. Fills every 8 bars at most.
• Count off. Start the pattern, let it run for two bars, then come in. Same as a real band.
• Comp with the drums. Try placing your chords on the “a” of 2 and the “a” of 4, exactly where the ride’s skip notes are. That’s when it really starts to swing.
• Practise slowly. Drop the tempo by 20 for anything new, then creep it back up.
• Add bass later. A drum machine has no bass line, so either play roots in your left hand, or run iReal Pro for bass and the drum machine for drums (turn the iReal drums off).

Exercise 13

Program Groove 1 on your drum machine at a medium swing, 120 (or 90 on the Volca). Play the F blues from Lesson 8 against it for three choruses: chorus 1 with shells on beat 1 of each bar, chorus 2 comping on the “a” of 2 and 4, chorus 3 with the right hand improvising. Then program Groove 2 and play “Autumn Leaves” as a bossa.

Sources

• The Volca Beats and TR-08 courses on this site, from the Korg and Roland owner’s manuals
• Wikipedia, Ride cymbal: the swing ride pattern
• Wikipedia, Bossa nova: origins and rhythm
• Recordings: Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959, drums by Jimmy Cobb); Stan Getz and João Gilberto, Getz/Gilberto (1964); Herbie Hancock, Empyrean Isles (1964, “Cantaloupe Island”)