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Funky Rhythms and Feel in Music

So, get to grips with that feel.

Once you're feeling a bit more happy with it, we can look at ways of making it a bit more funky.

• We can play it with a bit more spikiness, if you like.
• A bit more attitude.

Instead of those long notes in the left hand, we can play kind of short notes.

This may sound a bit funny, but if you change the harmony up a little, and rather than doing all this very major sounding stuff, you can add some juicy, gospel-y, bluesy harmony to it.

Minor Inflections

By introducing some minor inflections, suddenly it takes on a different side. It sounds a lot more like New Orleans funk, you know.

All I'm doing here is changing the way I'm playing it. The rhythms are essentially the same. Forgive me if I throw in some other stuff, but the groundwork is the same.

You can hear that by changing the voicings and perhaps changing the attitude with which you're playing, while still keeping that fundamental funky rumba feel underneath, it can take it in a whole new direction.

Practicing the Feel

A good way of practicing this is by tapping the rhythm.

Let's look at this feel:

• 3 and 4.

You can hear there it's just one on the left, then two on the right, and then one on its own at the end, a big fat one. You could imagine that as a big snare hit.

I'm going to demonstrate that tapping and then transferring the groove to the piano:

• Here we go, 3 and 4.

You can see that the feel can be transferred from the raw kind of fill you practice by tapping to the instrument. You can do all kinds of slight variations on that to make it funky.

Example Variation

• Something like this: 3 and 4.

It's a really nice rhythm that lends itself to what Fess uses on Mardi Gras in New Orleans. He can also use it here, and indeed, Booker uses it through Fess's influence on lots of stuff.

That's just a simple arpeggio going up.

In context, it would be:

So leading up to the four, essentially, that's it. They're using it in a slightly different way. Just going down to that third of the chord, 4.

Final Thoughts

There are some little ways of kind of making it funky. The important thing is to remember that the feel is still stomping away underneath with those accents, whether you're playing or not.

Time still going. Time still going. You can hear just a little nod towards a real Cuban thing at the end.