If I hear one more drummer or bass player play funk with an 8th note triplet feel, I'm going to strangle them....

I went into a Guitar Center in Chicago and there was a brother(young cat but still older than me)running of some funk licks on bass...

but he was playing everything with a 8th note triplet feel....and it was driving me nuts....especally since I had just come from a George Duke concert and his rhythm section did the same thing...

I wadnt trying to front him off at all....but I just asked him point blank...."Do you play all of your funk lines with that 8th note triple feel?...."

He looked kind caught off guard and said "Yeah, I do..."

I said, "It just seemd to me that everyone plays funk now with a triplet feel instead of with a striaght 8th feel like the original funk cats did..."

Dude sat there with this comtemplative look on his face....

I said, "Sounds real good, man..." and stepped...

I dont know who sent out the memo to older musicians that funk and hip-hop is to be played with that triplet feel....

There are two sub genres of Black music that used that rhythmic feel regularly.....New Jack Swing and Go-Go....

which is fitting because Teddy Riley, who created New Jack Swing, often used Go-Go rhythms in his earlier work...

so when I hear these cats go into this "funk" mode using triplets it sounds like New Jack to me....

The funk "feel" is built around straight eighths, often with emphasis on the one....

this is why alot of funk drummers tend to go "four on the floor"(see James Brown, Prince, Slave)....

Rhythmically, what makes funk so compelling is not the downbeat but tha ANTICIPATION of the downbeat....this is where syncopation comes in...

so a funk player may not always play ON that beat, he/she will be playing with that beat in mind...the beat is always implied...

"1, 2, 3, 4...."

that style of eighths gave birth to disco, a sterilized from of funk...

so when rhythm sections stop playing with the straight eighths and go into triplet feel, it fucks shit up....

Now you CAN be funky using a triplet feel, but the way to do that to go HARD on the ONE...that's how they do it in Go-Go....

So when Stanley Clarke threatens to get "funky" on you....watch the triplet feel come out....


The avatar: Get well, Angie...

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Quote of a lifetime:
"...music is not just a hobby or what I do...it's what I live...music is the voice of my god, my vehicle for spiritual enlightenement..."
-OKP Illogicz