SHOULD WE PLAY ON THE ONE?

Hi there! Look back a few pages, and you’ll see a great lesson on funk playing from my colleague Steve Lawson. He mentions that when you hear musicians talk about funk or groove, you’ll often hear them say that everything has to be ‘on the one’. This lesson is going to challenge that theory a little bit.

In my first lesson for , I talked about the importance of gaining a deep understanding of each note within the 16th note subdivision—the so-called ‘1-E-&-a’. In that lesson, we isolated each note while playing with a metronome, and in going through this lesson with my students, it is the ‘E’ and the ‘a’ of the bar that they tend to find most challenging. If