8-beat and 16-beat grooves

Fill all sixteen hi-hat steps and the same kick and snare suddenly sound twice as busy. At 120 bpm that is 8 hi-hat strokes a second.

Naming a beat by its hi-hat

Many drum books, especially in Korea and Japan, name everyday grooves by what the hi-hat plays in one bar. An 8-beat has eight hi-hat strokes, one on every eighth note: this is the basic rock beat from the last unit. A 16-beat has sixteen, one on every sixteenth note, filling every step on the pad. A slow ballad often uses a 4-beat feel, with the hi-hat or ride only on the four beats. The kick and snare can stay exactly the same in all three; changing only the hi-hat changes how fast the music seems to move.

One hand or two?

At slow and medium tempos a 16-beat hi-hat is played with one hand, the right hand for a right-handed player, while the left plays the snare on 2 and 4. As the tempo rises the single hand runs out of speed: at 120 bpm sixteenths come 8 times a second. Then drummers switch to alternating hands on the hi-hat, right left right left, and the right hand moves over to the snare on beats 2 and 4. Both ways are standard. The one-hand version sounds smoother and more even; the two-hand version can go faster and is common in funk and disco.

Kicks on the sixteenths

The 16-beat grid opens up new places for the kick. In an 8-beat, extra kicks fall on the "&" steps, 2, 6, 10 or 14. In a 16-beat they can also fall on the "e" and "a" steps, such as step 3 (the "a" of 1) or step 7 (the "a" of 2). A kick on the "a" just before a beat pushes forward into it and gives the groove a bounce. These are called syncopations: accents placed off the main beats. Add them one at a time and keep the snare where it is, or the listener loses track of where beat 1 is.

Dynamics matter more as the hi-hat gets busier. With sixteen strokes a bar, playing every one at the same volume sounds like a machine gun. Drummers usually accent the strokes on the beats and the "&"s and play the "e"s and "a"s softer, so the eighth-note pulse still comes through the sixteenths. The pad in this course plays every step at one volume, so try it on a table with two pencils to feel the difference. Count "1 e & a" out loud and press harder on "1" and "&" than on "e" and "a". After a minute the accented strokes start to sound like a separate, slower pattern riding on top of the sixteenths, which is exactly the effect drummers want.

Try it

The first pad is a 16-beat with a kick on step 10. Turn off every odd step on the hi-hat row to turn it back into an 8-beat and listen to the difference. The second pad is a slow 4-beat ballad feel.