How to Write an Afro House Groove - Samplesound Academy with Ben Murphy
Hi this is ableton certified trainer Ben Murphy with another quick tutorial for sample sound we're going to keep looking at different drum patterns and this time explore some different genres so first of all here's an afro house drum pattern
okay let's break that down a little bit first of all the kick and the shaker
so what you can probably tell is this looks a lot like the patterns we've created in the past for styles like techno this is the really house part if you will out of aphro house this is the kind of the dance music style anchor that makes this uh a part of that house sort of pantheon right that sort of dance music style genre we have a four on the full kick drum and we have a shaker that's doing what our hi-hat was doing in the past for our techno patterns um doing the accent on every uh halfway between every kick drum
so that's a good strong foundation what's really fun with avro house is kind of doing creative things with the percussion around this anchor so next we've got some uh some sort of tuned drums kind of like tom drums but uh different sort of sounds from the kind of afro world um so here are those so what's really interesting about um where they are placed in the bar is that they are just ahead of the second beat just ahead of the third beat and just ahead of the fourth beat right so each of these tuned drum sounds is also a little bit lower in velocity and a little bit late on the grid and all of this combined makes it really feel like you're kind of falling forward into those accents on beats two three and four they help kind of like create that sense of momentum into those next kick drum hits right have a listen again um this is what's referred to as syncopated those are syncopated hits and that basically just means being a little bit early or a little bit late around the major accents which for us is our four-on-the-floor kick drum pattern and that can be a really interesting thing to add to a pattern like this in a style like afro house as it gives a little bit more interest and again some more of that kind of push and pull around the accents okay so let's take a look at the next percussion element so this percussion element is doing something a little bit different to everything else i'm going to turn off some of the other layers and just play you the new high pitched percussion sound alongside the kick drum sound
so what's really fun about this sound is that unlike everything else that's really kind of building itself around the kick drums right like the shaker that's halfway between all the the pitched percussion sounds that sort of fall into the kick drums this sound is actually kind of doing its own thing rather than kind of operating on the same grid as everybody else it's organizing its accents in sets of 3 right there's 3 16 and then 3 16 and then 3 16 and so on right except for the last one which has to get a set of 4 to kind of conclude at the end of the bar but this sort of sets of three rather than sets of four that everybody else is using creates an interesting again kind of like relationship between these two different pulses this is what we refer to as a polyrhythm it's two different sort of styles of rhythms that are happening concurrently it's certainly not the kind of thing you need to do every time you write an afro house pattern or in any kind of genre for example but it can be fun to play with and i think afrohaus really kind of gets the most creativity out by playing around with creative ideas and percussion so things like syncopation and polyrhythms are really fun to try to mix in there so here's that whole pattern back together again um all these sounds by the way come from the blum afro house pack for
