Ghost Notes on the Snare: A Beginner's Guide

Listen closely to a funk or R&B groove and you'll hear a soft chatter on the snare in between the loud hits on 2 and 4. Those are ghost notes: very quiet strokes that fill the gaps in a groove. You feel them more than you hear them, and when they're taken away the same beat sounds stiffer. They aren't an advanced trick. They're a normal snare stroke played from very close to the head.

What a ghost note is

A ghost note is a snare note played much more quietly than the notes around it. On a kit set up right-handed it's usually played by the left hand, while the right hand keeps time on the hi-hat. In written music it's a normal snare note with parentheses around the notehead.

The important word is contrast. A ghost note only works next to a strong backbeat. If the loud notes and the quiet notes drift toward the same medium volume, you don't have ghost notes any more, you have a busy snare part.

It comes down to stick height

How loud a stroke is depends mostly on how far the stick travels before it meets the head. So you control ghost notes with height, not with squeezing or holding back.

For a ghost note, start with the tip of the stick about an inch above the head and let it drop. Don't lift it first. That small drop is the whole stroke.

The harder half is what happens after a backbeat. A loud stroke wants to bounce back up to where it started, and if the next note is a ghost, the stick is now far too high. So after the backbeat, let the stick come to rest low, close to the head, ready for the quiet note. Drummers call that a downstroke. Keep your hand loose while you do it. You're catching the stick, not clamping it.

Warm up the left hand alone

Before adding the rest of the groove, play only the snare part on a pad or the snare. Count sixteenth notes out loud, "1 e & a, 2 e & a," and play a loud note on 2 and 4 with a ghost note on the "a" after each one. In the grids below, each character is one sixteenth note, O is a loud snare, g is a ghost note and a dot is a rest.

Watch the stick. It should come down from high for the loud note, stay low, tap once, and only then lift again for the next backbeat.

A first groove with ghost notes

Start from the Money Beat: eighth notes on the hi-hat, snare on 2 and 4, kick on 1 and 3. Then add the two ghost notes from the warm-up.

Each ghost note falls on an "a," which is the gap between two hi-hat notes. Nothing else plays with it. If it lands at the same moment as a hi-hat note, it's early or late, so slow down and count the sixteenths until it sits in the space.

Add one more

When that feels settled, add a ghost note on the "e" of 3 and a second kick on the "&" of 3.

Beat 3 is now three notes in a row from two limbs: kick, ghost, kick. The hi-hat plays with both kicks and the ghost note sits alone between them. Take it slowly. This little kick-ghost-kick shape turns up in a lot of grooves.

What usually goes wrong

• The ghost notes are too loud. Check the height first. If the stick is starting three or four inches up, it can't play a ghost note, however gently you swing it.
• The backbeat shrinks. Concentrating on quiet notes makes everything quiet. Keep 2 and 4 as strong as they were in the plain groove.
• The hi-hat copies the snare hand. Your right hand should stay at one even volume while the left hand changes. If the hi-hat dips whenever a ghost note comes, go back to the left hand alone, then add the hi-hat again.
• Your hand tightens up. Tension makes the quiet notes uneven. If your grip is clenched, stop, shake it out, and start again slower.

If you use Lazy Lopez: Drums, grooves in standard notation show ghost notes in parentheses, and the grid view draws each hit as a dot whose size tells you ghost, normal or accent. In the groove editor a cell cycles through hit, accent, ghost and rest as you tap it, so you can enter the grooves above and loop them at a slow tempo.

Ghost notes are a small thing that asks a lot of your coordination: one hand playing two volumes while the other hand and a foot carry on evenly. If that's the part that falls over, limb independence work will help more than extra repetitions. If it's the stick itself that won't stay low, go back to how you're holding it and check for tension.