The People's Republic of South Devon

Getting the Groove: Katie Marie has been preparing for her demo-ing at the Frankfurt Musikmesse in April

Hope as always that you’ve had a stupendous week full of lots of good stuff. As mentioned in my previous article I did head up to Salisbury last weekend to gig with Nicky Swann. It was oodles of fun and I made a little video about it which you can check out…

This week I’ve been working hard trying to come up with various beats and rhythms using my Cajon and stomp box ahead of the Frankfurt Musikmesse in April. I’ll be playing on the Logarhythm stand demo-ing the Cajon with a Logarhythm stomp box and I’ve been trying to come up with different ways to make it interesting and diverse. It’s been fun and a real learning curve as I’ve been learning beats that I probably wouldn’t have thought of on a standard kit.

The two grooves that are *really* frying my poor little pea brain are the Samba type ones where I’m doing lots of different things with all my limbs.

The worse one I think is where I’ve got a clave pattern in the left foot, a kick pattern in my right foot, with the main groove happening in my hands. I can just about play it all together slowly, but after 8 bars it seems to fall apart (as does my brain!!).

Here it is written out if you fancy giving it a try at home… this one features a Tumbao style pattern in the hands:

(RF = Right Foot, LF=Left Foot, LH=Left Hand, RH=Right Hand, B=Bass T=Tip S=Slap)

… and if you fancy another one, here’s the other groove that’s been frying my little brain:

Let me know if you have more luck than me, or if you have any suggestions for new grooves to play with!

I’ve also been messing around with playing a Logarhythm stomp box by hand, which is suprisingly effective. You have to play it like bongos (lots of finger tips) and work out were even the tiny-est of tone variations is, but once you get used to it you can come up with all sorts of interesting bits and bobs.

This is a vid that Lisa took after a rehearsal the other day when I started messing with what ever popped into my head:

So yeah, there’s plenty to get on with before I go away!

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