New Orleans Funk
Second line parade rhythm dragged into a studio and made to sit still.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Six kicks in bar one and five in bar two, and none of them on beat 2 or beat 4. Bar one puts one on beat 3, bar two moves it to the and of 3, the sort of substitution these drummers made every time round. The cowbell plays a 3-3-2 and in bar one lands on exactly the six steps the kick does, the way a parade bass drummer and bell player would; bar two adds a seventh hit at 52 and they come apart. The backbeat is lopsided on purpose: 96 on beat 2 against 116 on beat 4, with ghosts between 28 and 44, one on the a before each backbeat, and a lead-in at 48 and 58 ending bar two. The hat plays sixteenths with a single opening, on the and of 3 in bar one and the and of 2 in bar two. What the grid cannot show is that the whole kit sits a hair behind the hat, which is why the how-to asks you to delay two lanes and leave the others alone. It also cannot show that this feel lives between straight and swung and moves inside a single bar. Swing at 0.56 is a compromise rather than a measurement.
What it is
Joseph Modeliste was still a teenager when the Meters started cutting instrumentals for Josie, and what he played was not really a drum kit part at all. It was two parade drummers, a bass drum and a snare walking behind a brass band, compressed onto one stool. That is why the kick moves so much: in a second line the bass drummer is playing a melody rather than a pulse, and Modeliste kept the habit indoors. Allen Toussaint had been building records the same way since the early sixties, and Earl Palmer had put the shape into rock and roll a decade before that. The result is funk with the weight distributed unevenly across the bar, where beat four often hits harder than beat one.
What it sounds like
Small drums, close microphones, and a room you can hear the size of. The kick is undamped and rings a little. The snare is fat rather than sharp, tuned low with the wires tight, and the rimshots crack. Guitar is a Telecaster played clean with the amp just breaking up, in and out on sixteenths. Organ holds a chord and the bass plays something closer to a hook than a bassline. Everything is slightly behind the beat except the hi-hat, which is dead on it, and that gap is most of the feel.
Key elements
- A kick that plays a tuneFive or six kick hits a bar spread across syncopated sixteenths rather than four on the beat. Read the lane as a melody line and it makes more sense than reading it as a pulse.
- Weight on fourThe backbeat on 4 lands harder than the one on 2. Reversing the usual emphasis is what gives the bar its forward lean and its parade feel.
- Ghosts before the backbeatQuiet snare hits on the a before beat 2 and the a before beat 4, setting the crack up rather than answering it.
- Cowbell on a tresilloA 3-3-2 figure, six hits across the bar, following the Caribbean pattern that reached New Orleans a century before any of this. In bar one it shadows the kick exactly and in bar two it does not.
- Behind the beatKick and snare land a few milliseconds late against a hat that does not. Push the whole kit back and leave the hat where it is.
How to get them
- KickLeave it undamped so it rings for about 300 milliseconds. The overlap between consecutive syncopated hits is part of the sound, and muffling it produces a much duller pattern.
- SnareTune low, wires tight, and use a rimshot sample for beat 4 and an ordinary hit for beat 2. Two different sounds on the two backbeats is not a detail, it is the arrangement.
- Nudge the timingMove the kick and snare lanes ten to fifteen milliseconds later than the grid and leave the hat and cowbell where they are. In most DAWs that is a track delay, which beats editing every note.
- Room microphoneOne mono microphone three metres back, compressed at 8 to 1 with a slow attack so it breathes back up between hits. Mix it under the close mics until you can just hear the walls.
- GuitarClean Telecaster into a small valve amp on the edge of breakup, chopping sixteenths with a lot of muted strokes. Pan it hard to one side, the way those records did.
Reference points
The Meters, Joseph Zigaboo Modeliste, Allen Toussaint, Earl Palmer, Eddie Bo, Lee Dorsey, and the Josie and Sansu catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.