I Heard it Through the Grapevine - Music Lesson

Hi! Here we're looking at I Heard It Through the Grapevine, the Marvin Gaye Motown classic. It features several really useful and challenging patterns.

Intro Pattern

The first one of them is where we're playing a pattern just between the feet, which could be thought of as almost like a samba or bossa nova foot pattern. This runs through the four bars of the intro and sounds like this:

• The intro section is marked piano on your music.
• You could also play that with both feet heel down if that feels a little more comfortable.

This leads us into a classic Motown fill. Before we head into the verse, we move from the rack Tom down to the floor Tom. This starts on beat three of the bar, leading everything with your right hand.

Verse Pattern

• It goes from the rack to the snare to the floor Tom.
• At that point, we reach the verse.

Key Point:
We will not play a crash cymbal at the beginning of the verse. Instead, we'll transition from the fill on the floor Tom to starting eighth notes on the floor Tom.

The challenge is maintaining the eighth note pulse over the top of the foot pattern that we had running through the intro. Before we add the snare drum to that, let's try playing the foot pattern and adding the eighth notes on the floor Tom to hold those two parts together.

Adding the Snare Drum

The final ingredient to that verse pattern is adding the snare on beats 2 and 4. I'll play it a little more slowly.

• One of the things to look out for with a pattern like this is the togetherness between the limbs.
• For example, when you're hitting the snare on two and four, it's falling simultaneously with the hi-hat.
• Make sure those notes really are falling together. The same applies for the bass drum coinciding with the floor Tom as well.

Transitioning to the Chorus

Let's take it from our intro fill into the verse feel. Just at the end of that example, I played the fill that transitions us from the verse into the chorus:

• This fill consists of three eighth notes on the snare playing the and of three, four, and the and of beat four.

I'll play that alternating it with the regular groove so you can hear how that sounds. This is the two bars before the chorus.

Chorus Overview

The chorus starts with a crash on the downbeat of beat one but is basically the same groove as we were playing through the verse.

• That eight-bar chorus ends with the same fill that we heard during the intro, taking us back to the intro feel.

I'll play a condensed version of that chorus. We'll start with the crash cymbal, play four bars of time, and end with the fill that takes us back to the intro.

Instrumental Section

That intro vamp lasts for another four bars and ends with our classic Motown fill again. We then go into the last four bars, which is the instrumental section, where we head over to the ride cymbal.

• The bass drum pattern changes slightly, and it's worth noting the change in volume to forte, increasing in intensity at this point.

Here's the groove you hear during the instrumental section:

• This instrumental section ends with an anticipated crash, crashing at the end of beat four of the final bar instead of the downbeat or beat one of the next bar.
• This anticipation is sometimes called a push, where we anticipate the downbeat.

Final Playthrough

So, in context, I'll take it from two bars before the final four-bar instrumental section.

• We're going from that intro vamp, transitioning with the fill moving over to the ride cymbal, and then after four bars, we end with that fill that has the anticipated crash to finish.

Here we go!

And that should be all of the parts you need to play this iconic Motown track. Enjoy!