Chords for How to play Breakbeats Fast

What do these two beats have in common? _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ And this one? _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ Chances are you've heard both of them without realizing it.
The first one was James Brown's Funky Drummer.
The second one was the drum break from Amen Brother by The Winstons.
So these beats have been sampled and chopped up and slowed down and sped up so many times in electronic music.
Chances are you've heard them many, many times just without realizing it.
In the case of jungle and drum and bass, it would not be practical to try to play the original pattern at the new tempo.
Because there's just so much going on there.
There's so many details that would just be lost.
And it would be extremely difficult to play.
But there are certain things you can do to play drum and bass beats live.
And a lot of people do it.
I mean, you've got Pendulum, Jojo Mayer, Lewis Cole.
People find a way to do it.
And I've got my own bag of tricks here, so I'm going to show you some of those.
So, the first thing to know about drum and bass is that there's not really a whole lot of this going on usually.
_ _ _ Usually, all it is is just this. _ _ _ _ _ _
Usually, it's actually just the second pattern I played there. It's just_ _
_ _ _ _ So, taking away a lot of the ghost notes and details allows you to speed it up for sure.
But it's still kind of hard to keep up the eighth notes on the hi-hat.
Let me show you. _ _ _
_ _ So, we've got a breakbeat tempo there, but we're still not at drum and bass tempo.
So, let's keep speeding up a little bit.
Let's go like_ _ _ _
_ _ _ That's still really slow for drum and bass.
Most drum and bass is like_ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ If you're a human being on a drum set, that's going to wear you out pretty fast.
_ _ You can do it, but the longer you do it, the more tired you're going to get.
What I like to do is change up the pattern.
Normally, you're doing eighth notes on the hi-hat and two and four on the snare.
But you can cut out the eighth notes on the hi-hat where the snare comes in, so that there's no overlap of the beats.
This is called linear playing, where generally only one thing is happening at any given time.
So, it's like this. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
So, you can do that and then just add the little ghost notes on the snare still.
You can play it this fast. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ And you can speed it up even further if you cut out more eighth notes.
Like, instead of playing this_ _
_ _ You just play the hi-hat where nothing else is happening at all.
So, wherever the kick comes in, you drop out.
Wherever the snare comes in, you drop out.
What you end up with is this. _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ And you can speed that up crazy fast. _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ And if you really get that itching to fill in the space with eighth notes or even sixteenth notes, let me show you another one you can do.
Now, you're really going to have to work on your double strokes for this, but I'll play it slow so you can get the idea.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ So, you can take that kind of beat and play it really, really fast. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ That one takes a lot of work, but you can do it.
You can do a lot of cool stuff if you just simplify and work on it, speed it up, make it your own. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ [B] _ _ _ [Eb] _ _ _