Funk & R&B · funk · 4/4 straight

Funk piano (16th-note comp)

100 bpm Loop: all
16ths

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Sixteenth-note funk comping on a i–IV vamp in C Dorian (Cm7 | F7), the Rhodes/Clavinet language of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and Stevie Wonder. The grid is sixteenths at ~100 bpm; the chords are short stabs that sit on a few of them — the downbeat, the "a" of 1, the and-of-2, the "e" of 3 — and the rests are as important as the hits. Bar 2 answers with a different placement and one longer chord on the and-of-4.

How it sits: the bass line is a syncopated octave/root figure that lands with the piano on the downbeat and the and-of-2 and fills around it; the left hand only doubles the bass on 1 and the and-of-3. The percussion layer is quarter notes (the hi-hat would play all sixteenths).

Listen for the "one": funk comes back to it every bar, and everything else is displacement. Play dead on the sixteenth grid, no swing.

Practice: tap sixteenths with the right hand on the lid and count "1 e & a"; place each chord by its syllable before you play it. Authored from standard practice — no transcribed source in the workspace.

Sources

  • standard practice (Rhodes/Clavinet funk comping); no transcribed source

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Tempo −5 / +5
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