EDS Songbook Level One Give It All – Hip Hop
EDS Songbook Level One Give It All – Hip Hop
Download and print out the score, so that you can refer to it as you follow the keyboard chart.
Start by going through the chart, step by step, looking at each section and understanding what the chart is asking you to do.
The first thing you will see is the name of the tune, ‘Give It All’, and the name of the composer. The title is the important one as, if you had a number of songs to play, it is essential that you play the correct one!
At the top left hand side, before the tune starts, you will see the note '4 Clicks'. This means that you will hear four clicks before the tune starts. This will help count you into the song.
Next is the time signature, ‘C’, which is the sign for ‘common time’ and means there are four beats in each bar. This is familiar territory for you.
The first thing you will notice is that the Introduction just requires you to play the hi-hat, using eighth notes for four bars. The fourth bar has a snare drum on beat 4, which introduces the next section where a rock groove starts. It is a straightforward groove which you will recognise from Lesson 6. This is played for eight further bars, and then you are into the Chorus.
The Chorus begins with a cymbal crash before continuing with a straightforward rock groove. The Chorus is only eight bars long, and there is only one variation — the eighth bar has an extra bass drum on the ‘+’ of ‘4’, to take the song into the Verse.
You move into the Verse with a crash cymbal, and then you continue the groove in a similar vein. Note, however, that every fourth bar has an extra bass drum on the ‘+’ of ‘4’. The Verse is a ten bar phrase.
The next Chorus is the same as the first Chorus, so there are no surprises.
After the Chorus the song moves into a new section, which is called a ‘Bridge’. It is called a bridge as it links two sections together. There is a small fill at the fourth bar of the Bridge. This is a different fill to the ones you have played before. It is played solely on the bass drum, with a backbeat, on beat 4, on the snare drum. As it is a pattern you have not played before, just run it round a few times to make sure you are comfortable.
The fill takes you into the next Verse which is, again, a ten bar phrase. The last bar is another new fill. You will see that it is a kind of breakdown of the groove. The hi-hat is played on its own for two beats, and then there is half a bar of backbeat — to pick the tune back up into the last Chorus.
These small variations in the drum part make subtle dynamic changes to the music, and play a very important part in adding to the style of the music. Like House music, a lot of Hip-hop was traditionally, and still to a large extent is, recorded using programmed drums. Programmers do not program the drums in the same way as drummers would play the part. This has led to a situation where drummers now copy programmers drum parts. This has created new drumming vocabulary which the course tries to introduce to you, as modern contemporary drummers.
The last Chorus is played twice and, as in a number of the other tunes in the course, you finish the song by playing the bass drum and crash cymbal on the first beat of the last bar.
Now, watch and listen to the multimedia files, and follow the chart through a couple of times.
Once you have done that, have a go yourself. You can play with the drummer, or mute the drum track so that you can play with the band on your own.
Remember to:
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