Bank · 13 grooves
Disco Funk
Disco is dance music built from funk, soul and pop, characterized by a sixteenth-note division of the quarter notes established by the bass. This bank holds the dance-oriented side of funk.
What makes these thirteen different
Every other bank in the app asks where the accent falls. This one asks something else: whether the floor keeps moving. Disco grooves are not complicated on paper, and that is exactly the problem with programming them. A four on the floor kick and a steady hat are three lines in any sequencer, and three lines in any sequencer is what a dance floor stops believing after sixteen bars.
What these patterns carry is the sixteenth-note pulse underneath, the thing the bass player and the hi-hat agree on before anyone plays a note. Once that pulse is there, the snare can sit late, the hat can open on the upbeat, and the kick can drop a beat without the groove losing its footing. Take the pulse away and the same notes turn into a metronome with ambitions.
They are also the most forgiving bank to jam with. Push the jam slider on a complex fusion pattern and it can fall apart; push it here and you get the thing a disco drummer actually does over eight minutes, which is to vary the hat and leave the floor alone.
Playing them
Tempo, and the trap that comes with it
Any groove in the app plays at any tempo you set, and disco patterns tolerate a wide range before they stop sounding like themselves. What changes with tempo is not the pattern but how much improvisation it can take: the faster you go, the less room there is between the sixteenths for the drummer to add anything, and the jam slider quietly has less to work with.
That is worth knowing because the fix is not to turn jam up. It is to let the kit do the work instead. The same pattern through Studio and through ElectroKit is two different records, and switching kit mid-song is one tap.
Some of what is in here
- The Party
- DiscoFunk
- Busy Fire
- Edu's Groove
- Night
- Fun Todd
Thirteen in total. Save any of them into a bank of your own once you have edited it, and it sits alongside the factory ones in the same list.
Disco Funk is one of the seven factory banks. Try it free for 7 days
Next door
If this is not quite it
The plain Funk and Funk x2 banks hold the one-bar and two-bar grooves this one descends from, drier and more syncopated. Fusion takes the same language somewhere far more advanced, and Odd Times takes it out of four altogether.
All of them respond to the same two-axis pad, so whichever you pick, the improvisation and the intensity are still one thumb away.
Ready to groove?
Download Funk Drummer free and try it for 7 days.
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