The decade after Voodoo produced a wave of records — Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun, Bilal's 1st Born Second, Robert Glasper's Black Radio, Anderson .Paak's Malibu — that took the late-pocket vocabulary and refined it. Where ?uestlove's drumming on Voodoo was thick and dragging, the second wave is more precise: drum-machine-influenced placement (sounds programmed but isn't) sitting alongside the deliberate human swing.
The signature is a mechanical-feeling 16th-note hat — no acceleration, no slowing, the way a drum machine plays — combined with a snare and kick that intentionally don't sit on the grid. The contrast (rigid hat, fluid backbeat) is the sound.
Two Common Hat Approaches
- Even 16ths. The rigid version. Every 16th identical, no swing.
- Swung 16ths (the half-time shuffle). The 8th-note triplet feel of the Purdie shuffle, brought into a more modern context.
The Wobble
Many neo-soul drummers — Chris Dave most famously — push their ghost notes slightly off the 16th grid. Not on the &, not on the e — somewhere between, perhaps four or five 16th-grid positions per bar that all live a few milliseconds early or late. The result is a groove that feels human and slippery — like the drummer is sliding around inside a rigid metronomic frame.
Four-Bar Phrasing
Modern neo-soul is rarely a one-bar pattern. The phrase typically extends four bars — small variations every bar, a release on bar 4. Practice the four-bar version (Ex 4) as a single phrase, not four iterations of the same bar.
Exercises
Play this like a drum machine. Every hi-hat 16th identical in volume. Ghost notes mathematically the same volume as each other. Backbeats on 2 and 4 are the only loud notes. No human acceleration through the bar; no slowing into the backbeat. Mechanical and exact. This is the inverse of the deeply human Voodoo feel from the previous lesson — and the contrast between this version and Ex 2 is what makes neo-soul work.
Same skeleton, but now place certain ghost notes deliberately off the grid. The notation says they land on specific 16ths, but you play them a hair early or a hair late — your choice — wherever it feels right. Hat 16ths stay machine-tight. Backbeats stay locked. Only the ghosts wobble. The result should sound like a programmed beat that someone has manually nudged a few hits with a mouse — slippery, never quite settled.
The half-time shuffle returns — but with modern neo-soul touches. Sparser ghost notes than the Purdie shuffle (you don't fill every triplet partial — only some). Backbeat on count 3, swung 8th-triplets in the hat. Listen to Robert Glasper's records — Chris Dave plays this kind of shuffle but with the precision of a drum machine and the wobble of a human, simultaneously. Same vocabulary as Purdie, different aesthetic.
Bar 1 is home; bar 2 adds one extra ghost on the e of 1; bar 3 pulls back; bar 4 releases with a kick anticipation. Play tension → more tension → pull-back → release as one breath. Each four-bar block should feel identical to the last; the bars inside it shouldn't.