Hey drummers, I'm Brad Schlueter a drummer, teacher, and a writer for Drum! magazine. In this video We're going to learn to play quintuplets shuffles. Now quintuplet shuffles have become very popular in funk and hip hop styles They're also a great way to find the midpoint between straight and swung groups. They sound like this. A quintuplet shuffle is obviously based on a 5 note pattern in particular We're going to emphasize counts 1 & 4 and so if we're counting that it would sound like 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 and That's going to become our hi-hat pattern. Now to learn to play that and play that evenly without guesswork I'm gonna play my right hand on those counts while my left hand fills in more quietly between those counts. So I'm gonna play Right left left Right left Right left left right left 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 That sounds like this.
So the next step is get used to just hearing the hi-hat part by itself So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play the exact same pattern, but this I'm gonna play my left hand lightly on my thigh while my right hand still plays that high-hat pattern. So the next step is to get used to the full hand ostinato now the most important part is the backbeat So if we're playing One two three Four five One two three Four five One two three… over and over on the hi-hat the back beat can be one, two, three, four, five, One, two, three, four, five one, two, three, four, five, One, two, three, four, five… Now I could leave it at that, but I'm actually gonna make it a little bit trickier But that also sort of makes it easier and I'll explain what I mean in a second. What I'm gonna do is I'm the fill in more left-hand notes than just that and the reason that this makes it a little bit easier, and trickier, Is that by filling them in, it lets me know exactly where things are occurring, so it kind of helps me space out the right-hand notes a little bit better.
And then when I'm layering notes underneath with the bass drum, it helps me locate exactly where I want to place those. So the repeating hand pattern I'm gonna use for all of these grooves is gonna go right left left Right – both – both left right left left right – both – both left. That sounds like this. Now it's going to get somewhere started adding bass drum notes to this hand pattern now to keep everything straight and to help you learn The patterns there is a PDF that you can download by clicking on the card that will appear a little later in the video I've written all these patterns in 2/4 to keep things kind of short initially because these are hard enough as it is, and once you get used to shorter patterns uou can always combine them to create longer ones out of them.
The first groove has just the bass drum on count one Next four grooves basically outline different parts of the hi-hat pattern We basically play when we're hitting the hi-hat because that's an easier way get started and these grooves are tricky enough. The next three grooves are a little bit funkier. What we're gonna do is they had some bass drum notes kind of between and off some of those hi-hat notes. So they're not always gonna land with them anymore, and that's gonna create kind of a funkier, more off-kilter feel. So for the next pattern What we're gonna do is we're gonna divide sort of a backwards five stroke roll between the kick drum and the snare drum. by backwards five stroke roll I mean if you start on the last note – the single stroke. Right left left right right left right right left left and we sort of do that between the kick drum the snare drum. We're gonna do with Bass snare snare bass bass Snare bass bass snare snare and Then on top of that I'm only playing these hi-hat on the first and fourth note of each one of those quintuplets.
Let's give it a listen. Pretty cool, huh? I really like these grooves a lot. I think they're really unusual. They're certainly a way to spice up a practice session. Let's face it, if you're working on normal stuff all the time It's really nice to kinda take a break and work on something kind of unusual that really kind of bust your chops a bit, and these grooves definitely Will do that.
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