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Shuffle Grooves

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Many bass players feel very comfortable employing their slap techniques over a straight 4/4 rhythm, but far less comfortable when the music has a shuffle feel. When playing in the shuffle feel, linear slap grooves (particularly those that incorporate fretting hand slaps) can be a little more difficult to execute, and it’s these grooves that we’ll be focussing on in this video course.

A shuffle feel is where the beat is subdivided into triplets rather than eighth notes, or sixteenth notes. This feel is common in many genres of music, including rock, funk, jazz and blues, so it’s an important one to become comfortable with. It’s important to be aware that the shuffle feel can be notated in two different ways: in 4/4 time using triplets, or in 12/8 time. 12/8 time still has four beats in the bar but subdividing into three. The exercises in this chapter are written in 12/8.

You can learn more about shuffle grooves in the Slap Bass – Advanced Level video course, which you can find HERE. Don't forget to hit the Download Resources button above to receive the PDF worksheet and audio files that accompany these lessons.

This course contains the following videos, each of which can be selected from the video player above:

Exercise #80

As well as being played with a shuffle feel, this exercise makes use of the double popping technique. You’ll also see that popped double stops are combined with open strings here to reflect the harmony.

Exercise #81

In this exercise the triplet feel is reinforced using a slap-pop-slap ghost note figure on beats two and four of many of the bars.

Exercise #82

The ghost note triplet figure from the previous exercise makes another appearance here. Tenths are used in the fourth bar to support the chord changes.

Exercise #83

This complex line requires you to slap and pop on the same string in quick succession (see the final beat of bar 1 for example).

Exercise #84

This exercise uses the open-hammer-pop technique. You’ll also need to briefly switch to the two-handed tapping technique in the final bar.