Ghost notes and accents on drums
A ghost note is a drum stroke played so quietly that it is felt more than heard. An accent is the opposite: a stroke played louder than those around it. Between them they turn a row of equal hits into a groove.
What a ghost note is
"In drumming, a ghost note is played at very low volume, typically on a snare drum." In written music a ghost note is a note in brackets.
Ghost notes sit between the loud strokes. Their purpose, in the same source's words, is to be "heard under the main sound of the groove. This produces a subtle 16th-note feel around a strong back beat or certain accents." Take them out and the beat is the same pattern, and flatter.
What an accent is
An accent is a stroke made louder than its neighbours. The backbeat, the snare on beats two and four, is the accent most music is built around. A ghost note only works beside one: quiet means nothing until something is loud.
The figure
Fig. 1 is the snare of the first bar of the Amen break, the drum solo from 1969 that drum and bass was built on. It has two kinds of stroke. The backbeats are on steps 5 and 13. Three more strokes fall on steps 8, 10 and 16, each one a sixteenth note before a stronger place in the bar. The figure draws those three as ghost notes, low and in orange. Wikipedia names the break among its examples of ghost-note drumming.
On a drum machine
A drum machine needs a second number for this: how hard each step is hit. Some have it and call it velocity or accent. Beep Boop's drum keys do not. A step is on or off, and every hit of a voice is as loud as the last. On its SYNTH bench a note can be accented, which makes it louder and brighter; the drums have no such key.
So the two bars below are both true to the machine. The first plays every snare of the Amen bar at full strength, which is how Beep Boop's pattern page draws it. The second moves the three quiet strokes to another voice, RIM, a lighter and shorter sound, and leaves the backbeats on SNARE. It is not a ghost note. It is the nearest thing sixteen on-or-off keys can do, and the difference can be heard.
| Kick | 1, 3, 11, 12 |
|---|---|
| Snare | 5, 8, 10, 13, 16 All five at one loudness. |
| Hat | 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 |
| Tempo | 136 BPM |
| Kick | 1, 3, 11, 12 |
|---|---|
| Snare | 5, 13 The backbeats only. |
| Hat | 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 |
| Rim | 8, 10, 16 The three quiet strokes, on a lighter sound. |
| Tempo | 136 BPM |
Where to hear them
Ghost notes are a mark of funk and R&B drumming. Clyde Stubblefield's beat on James Brown's "Cold Sweat" and Jeff Porcaro's on Toto's "Rosanna" are named beside the Amen break as examples, and Bernard Purdie is named with them.
Sources
- The definitions quoted, the notation and the drummers named: Ghost note, Wikipedia.
- The Amen bar's snare, with its pickups a sixteenth before beat three, before the "and" of three and before the next downbeat: Ethan Hein, Building the Amen break. Which strokes are quiet, and how quiet, is the figure's reading and not a measurement of the record.
- One loudness a step on the drums, and the accent on SYNTH: Beep Boop's engine, where a drum step is a single bit and an accented synth note plays 1.35 times as loud through a brighter filter.
More sheets
- What syncopation isThe weight off the beat, on sixteen steps.
- A beat in 40 bytesTempo, swing, eight voices and a check byte.
- How to make a beatFour moves on sixteen steps.
- Sample-accurate timing on an iPhoneSteps counted in samples, and how that was measured.
- PatternsDrum patterns drawn on sixteen steps.
- Tempo by genreBPM for twelve genres, on one scale.