By altering familiar drum beats using permutations and variations you can create new drum beats without a huge amount of effort.
Take a drum beat or phrase you’ve got “in the bag” (one that you can play without even thinking about it), and alter it in some way.
One way of altering grooves to create new permutations is beat displacement.
Beat Displacement
In its simplest form beat displacement is something most drummers do all the time without realising. It’s the process of moving a particular note from the place where the beat would normally be (i.e. where the note would be “expected”) to a new position in relation to the other notes.
Beat displacement can exist in basic grooves. Choose a note that is going to be displaced. For this example it’s the kick drum on beat 3.
Move the highlighted kick drum one eighth note earlier. The relocated note is shown in red below, and so it now falls on the “and” of beat 2.
This is quite a common drum groove in itself and doesn’t necessarily fit with the description of “unexpected”. It’s when we start to displace more than one note in a groove that we really start to see the affects of beat displacement.
Double-displacement
To get a truely displaced drum beat you need to apply a displacement to one of the other “main” notes from the groove.
As shown in the next example, move the snare from the “expected” place (beat 4) by an eighth note to the left (to the “and” of 3):
Take the concept of double displacement away to other grooves you’re familiar with and you’ll see how quickly you can create new drum beats.
There’s a second way you can use displacement ideas to create new drum beats…
Start from a new place
A different approach to create new drum beats is to take a familiar groove and then start that groove from a different position in the bar.
Now start the groove from the second 8th note as if it were beat 1. The red line below helps illustrate this.
Try starting the groove from a different position in the bar. Below is another suggestion. Apply this concept to other familiar grooves you play.
Create drum beats using familiar grooves
We have looked at the basics of beat displacement. The two main concepts are based around moving notes to create new grooves or starting from a new position in the bar. You could get really creative by mixing the two concepts together – moving individual notes AND starting from a new position in the bar!
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