A David Garibaldi inspired groove

Hey drummers,

welcome to the first lesson of the blog. We start with one of my favourite drummers: David Garibaldi from Tower of Power.

In the video I play an extract from Michael Striegl's song "Ludwig Street".

The groove is clearly inspirated from the one that David plays on T.O.P. "Soul Vaccination".

Here you can download the transcription of David's groove and of mine.

 As you can see, the idea of my groove is a very simple elaboration of David's one: a translation of two quarter notes of the whole groove with a little variation on the accent/ghosts on the snare.

The difficulty was for me "not to hear" David's groove and to remain in flow with the "one" of the song, also because the reference point of the bass drum on the "one" is lost.

I like to teach the groove of Soul Vaccination to all my students for different reasons. There are really a lot of concepts in these sixteen 16ths, like:

- the polyrhythmic hand sticking;

- the sequence of "UpStroke-DownStroke" - "UpStroke-DownStroke" - "DownStroke-UpStroke" played on the snare;

- the two open HiHat, the first one for a 16th and the second one for an 8th note, that go both together with the bass of Rocco Prestia.

In the book of David Garibaldi "The Funky Beat" (Manhattan Music Publications) you can learn more about David's groove, and how he came to this by evolving grooves and concepts starting from the so called "King Kong Beat" of Pete DePoe.

Hope you enjoyed, see you!