In this lesson, I’m going to share with you one of my favorite double kick grooves. It’s got such a great flow to it once you master the fundamentals. The pattern is quite simple – you play fours kicks followed by a snare drum hit: Kick, Kick, Kick, Kick, Snare, then repeat this x4. We play these at 16th notes and over the top of this, we keep a quarter note count with the right hand.
What we’re actually playing within this beat is a Polyrhythm – specifically, the 5/4 Polyrhythm. What this means is that we’re playing a five-count in the same amount of time it takes for us to count to four.
If you remove the kicks and play just the right-hand quarter notes and the snare drum accents, you’ll be playing the 5/4 Polyrhythm.
Why is this useful? I use groupings of five a lot within my playing with TesseracT. Specifically, when playing fills and some ghost note patterns, I love to use five-stroke rolls as 16th notes against a quarter-note count. It creates a wonderful repeating pattern you can begin to use fluently the more time you spend with it. This exercise, in particular, will help to develop your feel of a synchronized five and four and it will also help develop your limb independence and double kick skills.
Loop Exercise
You can download a transcription of this exercise, and another four variants of this exercise below, and you can also download the Guitar Pro file.