Stab Breaks for Funk Piano

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Jonathon Wilson on behalf of expertvillage.com. We're learning how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano and last time we learned our second right hand comping pattern over our bass line. Things are just starting to stagnate a little bit, so we've got to add some variety, some unpredictability. So, this time, we're going to look at some variations on the rhythm. Playing along in our grooves, what kinds of little surprises can we throw in to change the groove around from time to time. There's a million of these. We're going to look at couple in this series. But the first couple, the first one we'll look at is just something that I like to call stab breaks, where we're playing along in our groove and we just sort of hit bass line, big chord all together. It'll be a couple of different things. I've got a particular example that I've written down that I'll show you here. Now let's start with that, very slowly with the metronome, so you can see what I'm going to do. I'm just going to play the groove and then I'm going to play this rhythmic variation at the end that you'll notice is different from what we've heard before. Okay, so things to keep in mind when you're playing this, obviously, this is something that you really want to jump out. It's supposed to be unpredictable; it's supposed to be a piece of variety that you have in your groove that you have going before. So, when these come up, be pretty aggressive about playing them, really hit those things hard. You've also got lots of opportunities to vary the rhythm. In this particular case, we've got two notes, two chords, you can play them both short, you can play short long, you can play a long short combination. There's all kinds of things you can do and this is just one variation. I'll change the long shortness of the rhythm a little bit just to show you how that would work. Okay? It sounds like this. Okay. So now we've added a little bit of variety, some unpredictability, into our rolling, otherwise happy, rolling groove. Okay, so we're going to keep that going. Next time, we're going to add another kind of rhythmic variation. Something completely different from what we did this time with our stab breaks."