Are you ready for your 1st blues shuffle drum beat?
Yeah, awesome! 🙂
My free drum notes will help you master this awesome groove.
Feel free to download the PDF and start learning your first shuffle on the drums.
It’s a versatile groove I’m sure you will love to play.
Speaking of:
To help you get the feeling for the blues on drums, I will also link a video with a great tune in this blog post.
It’s a drumless track in 6/8, but you can also use it for practicing our blues shuffle.
And now, let’s take a look at the bluesy beat, shall we? 🙂
How Your 1st Blues Shuffle Drum Beat Looks Like
So, this is our shuffle.
Fancy, isn’t it?
As you can see, it’s based on triplets.
You can count them as
1 e + 2 e + 3 e + 4 e +
After counting the 4 + (+ is pronounced as “and”), you start with the 1 again.
That’s because our beat is written in the 4/4 time signature.
If it were in 5/4, you’d start again after the 5 +.
Also, make sure that the eighth note pause in the middle of the hi-hat pattern is
- not too long and
- not too short.
It should be exactly as long as our other notes.
Pausing too long or too short is a common mistake when playing the shuffle on drums.
So, it’s really helpful for you to
- count properly,
- grab your click and
- listen to some great blues tunes
to get into the feeling of how this great genre should sound, and most importantly, should FEEL like.
After you know how to play the beat, repeat it at least 20 times correctly.
You might want to repeat it more often to really nail it.
It’s always helpful to practice something until you can’t get it wrong anymore.
Also, it helps you sound better as a drummer – even without an expensive kit.
As I said before, you can play our blues shuffle drum beat to this play along.
It’s pretty awesome:
I really like it and have used it a lot during my drum lessons.
Have fun with your 1st shuffle and let me know how you like it. 🙂
Cheers,
