Andrew Robertson

Demonstrating our bass line for this piece, we're going to look at the right hand and see how our bass player plays with fingers one and two, alternating back and forth. And look where the position of the hand is directly over the pickup, sounds and looks like this.

[Person playing the bass guitar]

In funk, you'll notice that the bass line is really articulate, lots of short phrases, short notes with lots of space in between. So how do we make sure that we don't have elongated notes on the bass line? If you look at our bass player's hands, you'll notice when he plays the D note he's just taking his fingers off slightly, which mutes the sound. So he's not taking it off the string but just releasing it from the fretboard just enough so that the sound becomes muted and hence gives us that short, articulate sound. And that's demonstrated in this way.

[Person playing the bass guitar]

You'll also notice that our bass player, when he puts his hand on the D note, that he's also – by looking at his fingers, you can see that he's actually closing off the other three strings below it. Hence, we don't get any ringing sound from the other three strings. And that sounds and looks like this.

[Person playing the bass guitar]

When we get to the solo section, this is a great opportunity for the bass player to add some variety to the music, some contrast, something colorful for the soloist to maybe bounce off from. And how do we do that? Well, we can use the thumb to give us what we call slap bass, which doesn't mean picking up the bass and throwing it on the ground. It gives us this popping sound, which just adds a little bit more groove to the music.

So how do we do it? If you look at our bass player's hand, he's playing with his thumb on the bottom string, and he's moved his hand up from the pickups up to just near the fretboard. And that looks and sounds like this.

[Person playing the bass guitar]

A fine addition to our jazz-funk bass playing is to add what we call popping, and that is done by effectively pulling the top string with our first or second finger, and that's demonstrated by our bass player just like this.

[Person playing the bass guitar]

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]

Andrew Robertson

In the funk pattern with the drum kit, the driving force behind that is the 16th groove, or the semiquavers groove, that comes from the hi-hats, and that sounds like this. 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Text on screen: 16th note (semiquaver) groove]

[Person playing hi-hats rhythm]

So extending our funk groove on the drum kit, we are going to add the snare drum to the existing hi-hats, the 16th groove, and we're going to ask our drummer to play on beats 2 and 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, and that sounds like this: 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Text on screen: 16th note groove plus snare drum]

[Person playing hi-hats and drum rhythm]

So now we get to add the bass drum to our funk groove. We've got the 16th pattern happening on the hi-hats. We've got a snare drum groove happening on beats 2 and 4 – 1, 2, 3, 4, and our bass drum groove will vary on any given funk groove, which is dependent on what the bass player is playing. In this particular piece, we're going to match up the bass drum with our bass player, and when we put it together with the 3 parts all together on the drums, it sounds like this, 1, and 2, and 3, and 4, and.

[Text on screen: Funk groove]

[Person playing funk rhythm]

So when we're playing in a funk groove, we don't want to keep playing the same pattern over and over again. For a 5-minute piece, playing the same drum pattern would become very boring and doesn't give us any colour or timbre in the music. So what can we do? We can add variety in the drum kit by changing cymbals. This is a great way, changes the whole ensemble sound.

We're going to do that by moving across to the ride cymbal, which is the larger cymbal that sits up just above the snare drum, and we can actually go to playing eighth notes on there rather than our 16th notes pattern. So instead of our semiquaver pattern, we're going to go to quaver patterns on the ride cymbal, and just just playing it on the standard ride symbol sounds like this, 1, and 2, and 3, and 4, and.

[Text on screen: 8th note (quaver) groove on ride cymbal]

[Person playing cymbal]

And a variation on that – instead of just using the regular ride cymbal pattern, we can move further up the ride to the dome part on the top, which we call the ride bell, where the stem comes through, 1, and 2, and 3, and 4, and.

[Text on screen: 8th note (quaver) groove on ride bell]

[Person playing cymbal]

And putting all this together sounds like this, 1, and 2, and 3, and 4, and.

[Person playing funk rhythm on drum kit]

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]

Andrew Robertson

In the funk rhythm section, the keyboard player will often do the alternative to what the guitar player is playing. The guitar player plays a more rhythmic figure, and the keyboard player plays an elongated, more sustained sound. That is often the way that they do it, and that's what we've got in part A of our piece of music. And demonstrated by our pianist, that's what it sounds like right now, a 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.

And now, moving to our B section, we move to a different chord. This is the G minor 7 over C chord, and that looks like this, directly from our B section on the part. A 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.

When we get to the solo section of the piece of music, we don't necessarily need to play what's written on the piece of music. We don't have to play the chart. We can create our own chords and our own rhythms, called comping. A really standard voicing that we would like to use on the piano is to use the chord that has 3rd and 7th in the left hand, which in this case is F and C. And in the top hand, our right hand, we have a standard D minor voicing, D, F, A.

[Person playing a chord]

If we want to extend that and go into what we call fourth voicings, i.e. intervals of 4ths, we could do that by using, in our left hand, F, B, E, in our right hand, A, D, G.

[Person playing a chord]

So using our original D minor 7 voicing that we had with our F and C in the left hand and our D minor triad in the right hand, we can create some extra sounds by literally moving up the scale of D Dorian scale. With our hands in that position, moving up incrementally by one interval at a time, we get these sounds.

[Person playing the piano melody]

The next thing to do would be then to add our own rhythms, and then we are really, truly comping in a funk style. And to do so, here's an example. It sounds just like this, a 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1.

In your school, you may not have a guitarist, so who takes that really important role of the rhythmic patterns that the guitar player would normally play? Well, you can actually give that to your keyboard player. Let's go to our first chord that we used on our D minor 7, which was the F and C in the left hand and the D minor triad in the right hand. And using a 16th pattern, so using our semiquaver pattern, alternating from left hand to right hand, we get a really great funk groove, and that's demonstrated fabulously by our pianist right now, a 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.

When you first sit down at your electric keyboard to play our funk groove piece, you may wonder, what am I going to play? What sounds have I got? Well, you can use a variety of sounds, and really, the great thing about it is for you to explore what sounds. And each one will give the whole ensemble a different timbre and provide a different effect that you might like in your ensemble.

So some of the original sounds that you would get to use in a 1970s kind of funk groove would be something like a Hammond organ sound. That might be called a rock organ on your keyboard. You might like the Rhodes sound, R-H-O-D-E-S. That's a really common sound that was used in the '70s in funk.

You might also want to use a synthesizer sound, a synthesized Moog sound that you might know from great artists like Cory Henry, for example. And finally, you might like to use just a standard electric piano sound, or electric Clavinova sound you might hear it called on your keyboard. They're all great sounds that you can pull out of your keyboard, and the best thing is you get to explore and find which one suits you.

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]

Andrew Robertson

In our funk piece, we have the first chord being D minor 7. On the guitar, it looks like this.

[Person playing guitar riff]

And you'll notice that it's a bar chord, and it doesn't have the D note in it, only the upper extensions of the chord. We don't need to have the D in there because the bass is playing that. Our next chord in the piece of music is G minor 7 over C, which is functionally a G minor 7 on the guitar part, and that one looks like this.

[Person playing guitar riff]

You'll notice it's a slightly different shape. The best thing about this is when we get to the bar before letter C, the chords move sequentially. They go G minor 7 –

[Person playing guitar riff]

– F-sharp minor 7 –

[Person playing guitar riff]

–G minor 7 –

[Person playing guitar riff]

– G-sharp minor 7 –

[Person playing guitar riff]

– all moving one fret at a time and finally resolving on the D minor 7 original –chord that we had before. In the funk rhythm section, the guitar plays a very prominent part because of its comping ability or groove ability, and if you listen closely, you'll hear that the guitar player plays two distinctive styles or sounds. There's the regular guitar sound that we're very used to but also a muted sound where they mute the strings.

So how do they do that? If you look at our D minor 7 bar chord, what the guitarist is doing is moving his fingers slightly off the strings, so not completely off the strings, but just away from the fretboard enough to mute the sound. The right hand – what does that do? It's a simple strumming technique of down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. We put those two together, and it sounds like this.

[Person playing guitar rhythm]

So, now what does it sound like when we put that with our unmuted or regular sound of the guitar? Simply just putting our fingers on the D minor fretboard but putting it straight down to the fretboard there with the same technique sounds like this.

[Person playing guitar rhythm]

The guitarist wouldn't generally do one or the other. They will do a mix of those two things to get that really classic funk sound that we're used to on the guitar. So let's put those two things together and our guitarist will demonstrate just like this.

[Person playing guitar rhythm]

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]

Andrew Robertson

Now that we've heard how our electric bass, our electric keyboard, electric guitar and our drum kit go together in an ensemble, this is how a great funk rhythm section would sound.

1, 2, 3

[Rhythm section playing Look what the cat dragged in]

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]

Andrew Robertson

When we improvise in a funk style, we want to focus on rhythm as we do in jazz. But the difference in the rhythm in the funk style is based around the 16th notes, or semiquavers. That's the driving pulse in this style of music. And 16th notes, semiquavers, is going to sound like this in a bar of music, 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing percussive rhythm]

Thanks, Ilya. That's the driving force of it. So when we're demonstrating improvisation, we will start with rhythm. Best place to start with that is clapping or body percussion. And we'll try and emphasize the 16th groove when we're doing that, a 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Rhythmic clapping]

Great. So we could extend that, of course. And now if we apply that to a melody, we're going to look at the scales that we're using in the song. And the first scale of the solo is the D Dorian scale. The D Dorian scale is C major scale moved up one interval. So it's all the white notes from D to D. And that's called D Dorian. And the D Dorian scale sounds like this, 2, 3, 4.

[Band playing]

Fabulous. And so when we start to incorporate the melody into that, we're going to just use one note. So we're focusing more on rhythm but we're applying melody to it. So let's use the D note. And I'll do a call, and you will respond, a 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

And so on. And once we've done that a few times, we could then get one of the students to do the call, and in this case, Teagan is going to lead us with that one, with just the one note, 1, and 2, and 3, and 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

Thanks so much, Teagan. And why did that work? Why was it easy that for us to all respond? It's because Teagan gave us really clear rhythms, and that's the key to doing this. We could then extend this idea by adding a second note to the scale. We'll do exactly the same call and response with adding two notes. So in this case, it's going to be D and E, the second note of the scale, a 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

And so on. And finally, we could actually add three notes to this. When we add three notes, suddenly we've got a lot more variation on what we can do. We've got low, medium, and high. And it adds – this is probably about as far as we want to go in initial statement. So let's try it with three notes, 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

Fabulous. I think the main thing when we're doing the call is to try and emphasize the 16th groove, and then we'll really start to get a funk-style improvisation going.

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]

Andrew Robertson

So moving ahead with our improvisation, in a funk style, we would like to use the 2 scales that happen in this piece of music, which is D Dorian scale over the D minor 7, which we've played before, but it sounds like this, 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Band playing]

So just using that scale, we'll get the rhythm section to groove using the chords in the chart, and we will do a call and response using the first 3 notes of the D Dorian scale, D, E, and F, 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

And we could extend that, obviously, and we could get the students to play that. Now, moving ahead, we would like to use it on the G Dorian scale, which is the second part of the solo section, and the G Dorian scale, which is the F major scale starting from G and finishing on G. That sounds like this, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

So using the first 3 notes of the G Dorian scale, G, A, and B flat, we'll do a call and response. We'll get the rhythm section to groove as per the chart. We'll get it in at this tempo, a 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

So we could continue that again. The next step would be to have the students do a round robin, everybody have a bit of a solo. In this case, we're going to demonstrate back on the D minor 7 using the D Dorian scale. We're going to have Braden, Georgia, and Sylvie play 2 bars each, and this would obviously be taken around the whole group. But we'll just stay with the 3 students, a 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

Thank you. So you could take that, of course, all around the group, and that's a great activity in itself. The final thing we'd like to look at is doing trading, where 2 students can actually have a musical conversation. In this case, we're going to use Rohan and Patrick. You're going to play 2 bars each on the D Dorian scale. And try and listen to each other, and try and create a sort of conversation in a musical setting. Here we go with Rohan first, 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Playing funk rhythm]

So that was using the whole Dorian scale, as you heard, fabulous presentation there by both Patrick and Rohan. But you can take that round through the whole ensemble, and that will get you going with improvising in a funk style.

[Image on screen: NSW Government logo]

[End of transcript]