Of all the drummers in the funk canon, Clyde Stubblefield's influence per minute of recorded playing is probably the highest. As a drummer in James Brown's band in the late 1960s, he played a 20-second drum break on a track called "Funky Drummer" that became — once sampling technology arrived — one of the most heavily sampled drum performances in the history of recorded music. You have heard this groove. You have heard a thousand records built on top of it.
This lesson teaches the structural pieces of a Funky-Drummer-style pattern: the ghost-noted 16ths, the syncopated kick, and the open hi-hat punctuation. We are not transcribing the recording note-for-note — that's a dozen books worth of debate among drummers. We are teaching the shape: the layout of features that make a groove sound "Stubblefield-y."
The Three Structural Pieces
- 16th-note hi-hat carpet with strong dynamic contrast between accents and ghosts on the hat itself.
- Snare ghost notes filling the space between loud backbeats on 2 and 4, with one or two snares hitting on the "e" or "a" of beats other than 2 and 4.
- Open hi-hat on a specific 16th — most often the "a of 4" or the "& of 3" — that hangs in the air for one 16th before being clamped shut on the next note.
Build the groove one piece at a time. Don't try to play it all at once on the first read.
Exercises
Skeleton: 16ths on the hat, backbeats on 2 and 4, kicks on 1, & of 2, 3, e of 4. No ghost notes yet. Lock this in before adding any other layer. The kick on the "e of 4" is the propulsive note — it pushes the bar across the bar line into the next 1.
Same kick figure. Now ghost notes pepper the snare line on the "e" of 1, the "a" of 2, the "e" of 3, and the "a" of 4. The snares on 2 and 4 are still loud backbeats; everything else with a snare in it is whisper-quiet. Aim for that 4-to-1 ratio you built in funk-ghost-notes. The bar should sound like a continuous 16th rustle with two crisp slaps.
An o appears above one hi-hat note — that's the open hat. It's on the "a" of 3 here. Lift your left foot off the hi-hat pedal a touch just before hitting that note, then clamp it shut again on the next note. The result is a one-16th-long "tssss" that punctuates the bar. Keep it short; an open hat that hangs across two 16ths starts to swamp the groove.
Two-bar phrase: bar 1 is the bar from exercise 3; bar 2 is a small variation — the kick on the "a" of 3 (instead of beat 3 and the "e" of 4) gives the second bar a slightly different push, and a different ghost-note distribution on the snare keeps the listener's ear engaged. Loop for at least 16 bars (8 repetitions of this 2-bar phrase) without letting the ghost density flatten out.