Shuffle Grooves

Many bass players feel very comfortable employing their slap techniques over a straight 4/4 rhythm, but far less comfortable when the music has a shuffle feel. When playing in the shuffle feel, linear slap grooves (particularly those that incorporate fretting hand slaps) can be a little more difficult to execute, and it’s these grooves that we’ll be focussing on in this video course.

A shuffle feel is where the beat is subdivided into triplets rather than eighth notes, or sixteenth notes. This feel is common in many genres of music, including rock, funk, jazz and blues, so it’s an important one to become comfortable with. It’s important to be aware that the shuffle feel can be notated in two different ways: in 4/4 time using triplets, or in 12/8 time. 12/8 time still has four beats in the bar but subdividing into three. The exercises in this chapter are written in 12/8.

Don’t forget to hit the Download Resources button above in order to download the PDF worksheet and audio files for this course (available to subscribers only). The worksheet is available with TAB and without, for those who wish to give their reading skills a workout.