Gadd shuffles

I stumbled across a video the other day of Steve Gadd playing a shuffle in which he used his left foot to play the skip notes.  This frees up the the left hand to just play backbeats, and the right hand to just play quarter notes - be it on the ride or hi-hat.  As no one limb has to play those two shuffled eighth notes really close together it creates a very relaxed feel.

Now, Gadd obviously isn't this first person to do this.  Mel Lewis immediately comes to mind.

But, as you'll have heard, Mel is playing a jazz ride cymbal pattern along with that left foot.  Gadd, on the other hand, is only playing quarter notes.  Again, to my ear this just makes the pocket deeper, and gives the groove an ease that's particularly applicable to rock and blues shuffles.

In the same video Gadd also went on in the video to do a few variations.  One was simply putting the odd push on the bass drum, like so:

He also put ghost notes on the triplet partial immediately after the back beat:

This opens it up to the possibility of turning the groove into some sort of half-time shuffle.

And while I was looking for a better video of Gadd playing these examples I came across another video labelled "Gadd Shuffle".  But it ended up being something different.  In this video Gadd was using his ride hand on the snare drum to create the shuffle.

Here you are playing those two shuffled eighths with the same hand, but with the right hand as you would on a ride cymbal anyway.  Again, it just seems to relax everything a bit.  Or maybe it's just Gadd being Gadd.

Anyway, the curmudgeon in me kind of wants to say "just work more on your left hand", which we all should do, but actually these are nice to have the your back pocket.  Stick them in your bag alongside the shuffles according to Keith Carlock.