Bank · 18 grooves
Fusion
Jazz-funk, with a strong back beat, electrified sounds and the analog synthesizers of its era. These rhythms tend to be syncopated, often very advanced, and genuinely difficult to perform.
The bank that needs the ghost notes
This is where the app's sound design stops being a specification and starts being the point. A fusion groove is mostly what happens between the accents: the sixteenth that is barely there, the snare buzz under the backbeat, the hat that is half open for one stroke and closed for the next. Program that into a machine with one snare sample and you get a drum part that looks right written down and sounds like a typewriter.
Every drum here answers to three hit types, and each of those rotates through alternating takes. The practical result is that a line of ghost notes is a line of slightly different ghost notes, which is exactly what a player does and exactly what a loop cannot. It is the difference between a pattern that survives eight bars and one that survives a song.
Several of these carry drummer names for a reason. They are transcriptions of an approach, not of a song: the way one player places the left hand, the way another builds a groove from a single-stroke line rather than from a backbeat. That is also why the guest drummers in the app change these patterns so much. A different drummer character improvises and fills differently over the same groove.
Playing them
Where the jam slider earns its keep
On a simple groove, improvisation adds. On these, it rearranges. Push the jam amount on a linear pattern and the drummer starts moving strokes between limbs rather than adding new ones, because there is nowhere left to add: the bar is already full.
That makes this the bank to explore with the two-axis pad rather than with the rhythm list. Pick one pattern, leave it, and spend a few minutes moving jam and intensity around. You will get further than by auditioning all eighteen, and you will hear what the improvisation engine actually does, which is hard to notice on a straight eighth-note groove.
Intensity matters here more than elsewhere too. Fusion phrasing lives at the quiet end, and the app's intensity axis reaches genuinely soft, not just quieter.
Some of what is in here
- Hop Scotch
- Busy Subs
- AntiBackBeat
- Syncopated Gadd
- Linear Plus
- Pull Out Ghost Note
- Drawing 32th Hats
- White Elefant
- Tower Of Inspiration
Eighteen in total, and the densest material in the app. If a pattern feels like too much for a song, that is what the jam slider at zero is for: it plays the pattern straight.
Fusion is one of the seven factory banks. Download for Free
Next door
If this is too much, or not enough
Too much: Funk x2 holds two-bar grooves with room to breathe, and Disco Funk keeps the floor moving without asking anything of you.
Not enough: Odd Times takes the same phrasing out of four and into fives and sevens, which is where most of these players ended up anyway.
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