Groove is in the heart

Groove. What the heck is that then? Sure, it makes you wanna dance and shake your rump but what exactly is groove and more specifically, how do you achieve groove?

Some people say you are just born with it and that it's impossible to learn. What a load of bollocks! At least according to my knowledge, Bootsy Collins wasn't born with  a bass guitar. He might be extremely gifted in the sense that it was easier  for him to learn to play that instrument than it would be for someone else. Still, most people with a working brain and a pair of working hands can learn to play it funky. It just takes dedication, motivation and understanding the building blocks of what groove consists of, either intuitively or via careful analysis.

In house music it's even easier. You can manage with just one hand and at a pinch, with a set of very nimble toes. In house music you can even cheat. You can sample a funky drummer (quite literally) and use that sampled loop in it's entirety or if you think that's lame or too old school, you can always use some fancy piece of software that extracts just the groove out of that funky drum loop. You don't have to know how to play an instrument, you can just program stuff until it sounds funky enough for you.


It's never THAT easy though. Even when you use every cheap trick in the book, you still gotta understand how groove works and learn to recognize when your  loop grooves and when does it need extra work. As I often do, I try to chop a big problem into smaller, more manageable pieces.

According to my research, there are four major factors that contribute to groove. Timing, the sound itself, the shape of the sound and interaction of the elements.


Timing. The most obvious one but also the hardest one. For the groove to be, well, groovy, there's no room for mistakes. One drum hit or a bassline note slightly in the  wrong place and the groove falls apart. This doesn't mean that everything should be tightly quantized or otherwise in a robotic order, quite the contrary. Slight, controlled timing fluctuations create the groove, particularly if we're talking about playing instruments and not just programming them. I won't touch the subject of playing here, simply because I'm not that much of a player and I don't have anything of note to say about it. The easiest way to create those slight, controller timing fluctuations is by using the swing function of your sequencer. Most sequencers and drum machines have some sort of a swing parameter to work with. Not all swings are equal however. Some sequencers create beautiful swing while some have swing that sounds like a drunken robot was playing it. Swing is only one way to do it though, often you simply want to manually move notes around until a  groove shows up. Though, I must admit that I'm a bit lazy at this part, I often use quite rigid quantization and choose to create the groove by moulding the sounds to my liking and sometimes messing with channel midi timing offset values.

Related to timing is the length of the notes. Might sound trivial, but is actually quite important. Da da da da doesn't sound rhythmically very interesting. Da daa daa da is a bit better. In real life situations, you might want to spend a quite a bit of time on getting the note lenghths just right. Often a simple riff can be quite boring with equal length notes, but if you play with the lengths, all kinds of interesting rhythms start to show up. I don't think there's a formula to this either, just play around with the values until you like the results.
 

The sound.  What does the sound have to do with groove you might ask? A lot, actually. While a skilled programmer or player might be able to make everything sound really funky, in reality some instruments just sound funkier than others. A bass guitar is much funkier than something that creates long, sustained tones for starters. Even in relatively similar sounds the differences in the funk factor can be tremendous. Many people, me included, like to sample old dusty breakbeats, chop them up and re-arrange the pieces. If you're not even using the same rhythm as the original sample, only the sounds the sample contains why do this? Why not just use something that's less immoral and illegal, like one shots from drum machines or acoustic drums from a sample pack? The answer is that those old, crackly, dusty drum sounds simply contain something that is either impossible or at the very least very difficult to create with anything else. They contain the essence of funk, which you can use to your advantage. Usually, when I make or audition sounds, playing just one note or a drum hit is enough to tell me whether it has the funk or not. A good sound inspires me to make something funky as well. Using bad or unsuitable sounds might not get me the kind of results I want, simply because it doesn't inspire me at all. Some people can make complete compositions on one instrument and only later transfer that composition to the instruments that end up in the final recording. I'm definitely not like that, I need to have the right sounds or at the very least, sounds that are in the ballpark from almost the very beginning.

The shape of the sound. What does that mean then and why is it important? It's actually of utmost importance. Unless you take your sounds from some sort of a premade kit, it's unlikely that they play well together and especially groove well together. You usually pick  or make sounds that kinda sound nice together, but don't fit perfectly. That's where the tools that mould the shape of the sounds come into play. In practice, if you want perfect results, you got to spend quite a bit of time with envelopes, compressors, transient designers and such until the whole ensemble plays and grooves together as one. It's of course possible to just get lucky and simply stumble upon sounds that sound groove well together, but most of the time you have to do some pretty heavy-handed production work. Especially important is working on the attack phase of the sounds. Sometimes all a sound needs is a small tweak of the attack stage of an envelope. Sometimes you it needs a series of tools, all doing relatively minor things which then add up to create a sound that works in the context of your track. It's very situation dependent and you need to really know your tools as there's simply too many variable for random knob twiddling to work.

Interaction of the elements. Unless you're using some sort of a premade construction kit, it's unlikely that a hodge podge collection of random sounds works together as a whole. You must pick, make or edit sounds so that they make musical sense together. Even though it sounds easy, it's a difficult thing to pull off without resorting to cliches. Something like 909 + 101 + Juno is a formula that works, but it's also a formula that's been used on thousands of records already. Not saying that it's impossible to write a good house track with just those instruments, but it'd be very difficult to make something that really stands out and has it's own personality. It's difficult enough with other tools already, no need to make things even harder.

How do the elements interact then? What causes it? Unfortunately, it's something that's very difficult to explain, especially by an amateur. My best advice and the one that I've given myself is simply learning to listen properly.  Try different things, learn to recognize when the elements are in the pocket. Listen to other people's music in a similar vein, try to hear why they work and your music doesn't.

And that's it for now. I would've liked to write more about the subject, but most of my free time is spent on actually making music, this blog is just a documentary side project of it. Most of the advice is more or less just about using your ears. Then again, that's very important and something I occasionally forget to do too.

Oh, and I made a new track too. I tried to focus on the groove, but not so sure it turned out the way I wanted to.