From the course: Bass: Teach Yourself

The dotted 8th and 16th note rhythm

From the course: Bass: Teach Yourself

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The dotted 8th and 16th note rhythm

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- [Instructor] Alright, now let's check out a new rhythm. This is the dotted eighth sixteenth rhythm. So first of all sixteenth notes are a new time value for you the note value is one lower than an eighth note. So instead of just dividing the beat in half, as one and two and, the sixteenth notes have actually four notes to each beat. So you typically count this as one e and a two e and three and a four e and a. Now when you see a dotted eighth next to a sixteenth note the dotted eighth note lasts the same duration as three sixteenth notes, okay? So together a dotted eighth and a sixteenth make up one beat. It just has this kind of lopsided feel. And there's a lot of types of rhythms and genres of music that use this. Rock, blues, funk, jazz, a whole bunch of different things. So let's just go through a few different ways to play this. First of all let's listen to just steady eighth notes going by, alright? So, I'm just going to play on the G string, and you can try to play along with me. Let's try this, here we go. One, two, ready go. (bass guitar playing) Alright, now let's try straight dotted eighth and sixteenths so it'll be one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a. Let's do two bars of this together, here we go. One, two, three, four. (bass guitar playing) Alright, so now we can play this rhythm in another way. And that's called a shuffle feel. Typically a shuffle feel is just a first note long, second note short, long short, long short, long short. And it's a little bit closer together than a dotted eighth and a sixteenth. Think about it sort of like an egg rolling down the hill. Alright, it's a little just lopsided as it goes. Let's try this together. One, two, three, four. (bass guitar playing) Alright, let's explore that groove, in the context of a bass line, here we go. (wood block tapping) (bass guitar playing) Awesome, alright let's check out the next example, which does the same type of thing, it still uses this feel. Let's check it out. (wood block tapping) (bass guitar playing) Alright, so let's check out how to use this, in the context of the blues. And this is a 12 bar feel. So you're going to see that there's actually 12 bars that loop around, which is a very common form within blues. So this is called Blues in C, check it out. (wood block tapping) (bass guitar playing) Alright, cool let's check out a shuffle lick that's in D. Here we go. (wood block tapping) (bass guitar playing) Alright now let's try a shuffle lick in F. (wood block tapping) (bass guitar playing)

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