J. Anthony Allen breaks down footwork, the fast Chicago dance music style built around a syncopated three-feel rhythm at 160 BPM. He programs a two-bar loop using TR-909 kicks, claps on the fourth beat, rapid hi-hats, and rim clicks, showing how velocity and hi-hat choke settings create the genre's energetic groove.
Okay. I thought what we'd look at next is footwork. Now, footwork is kind of a newer genre. It's newer to me. I only learned about it a year or two ago because one of our slam students is super into it, making some really great music using it. But I think it's. I think it comes out of Chicago. It has a lot to do with a particular kind of dance that looks a little bit like break dancing, but without the spins and stuff. More this really elaborate footwork, I guess, which is where the name comes from. So the cool thing about footwork is it has this. This fun syncopation. Now, I've used this word before, syncopation, but what. What we're really talking about here is this feeling of going in three for just a minute, but it happens all over the place. So if this is our tempo. Right. So this is a quarter note, the syncopation is going to be like this. So there's going to be notes in between notes that feel like the main beat, but it's a little weird. So let's look at how this plays out. I'm going to use probably a 909. I use 707. Okay, so let's add that here and let's make a bar, maybe a few bars. Let's make two bars. Okay. And let's dive in. Okay, so first thing we're going to have here, I'm going to zoom out a little bit. I don't need to look at 128th notes. Let's look at 16th notes, shall we? Okay. And now we can zoom back in a little bit. Oops, I'm zoomed way in up here. That's. I thought things looked funny for a second there. That's what I was looking for. Okay, so first thing we're going to do is deal with the syncopation. So what this is going to be is it's going to look like this. Okay, so this is kind of our main rhythm that happens here. And again, just like all genres, there's a million different ways to do this style of music. But what I want to do is kind of talk about the most typical, kind of one of the main things, at least I hear in footwork. So here's where the syncopation comes in. Because if you look, there's a pattern of three here, where we have one, two, three. One, two, three. One. Oops. Okay, one, two, three. One thousand two, three. One, two. Right. So this feeling of three makes it this. This kind of fun feeling. So it's going to be like, That's what it's going to feel like. So it starts off with that. So. And then we're going to repeat that again. So starts over here. Feeling of 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 1. And we're just going to kind of do that all the way across. So it lines up every other bar. Right. Okay. Then we're going to do a clap or a snare on four. But not on two. Only on four. Okay. Then we're going to do some different percussion. That's going to happen kind of every 16th note. There's a lot of kind of crazy hi hats going here. You could use rim clicks. You could use kind of anything for this. But it's a lot like trap in this way. So I'm gonna adjust these hi hats a little, just to give them a little bit of character. I kind of randomly turn some of them down. Not really thinking too hard about what I'm doing here. Okay. Just to give them a little bit different flavor. I'm just going to duplicate that. Okay. And then I want something else. Let's use a rim click on the off beats. That's gonna be too much. A little more subtle. Let's try that on the offbeat there and the offbeat there. Same thing on the next bar. Okay. So let's hear what we've got. Oh, and the other thing. This is really kind of cooking stuff. So this is like one about 160 BPM is where we want to be. Yeah, that's some fun stuff. Let's loop that. Okay. Now, one thing is just like before, we're not getting our open hi hat because these are. The choke setting is on here, which means only the hi hat, open or closed, can happen at a given time. So I'm going to get rid of the closed I have. There we go. See, this is why this stuff is great. It's a super dope beat, super fast. It's got that weird syncopation happening. See, it just makes you want to dance, like do crazy things with your feet. That's the whole intention. Cool. So that's the basics of footwork. Let's pick apart some tracks and see if we can find some fun stuff.
