108 BPM
Drums
Bass
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4/4
Drag rhythmic values into up to 4 beat blocks per line to build a drum groove, or click a tile then click a block to place it — handy on a trackpad.
Afrobeat was forged in Lagos in the late 1960s and '70s by Fela Kuti and his drummer Tony Allen, who fused Yoruba highlife, funk, and jazz into a genre built on long, hypnotic grooves rather than short verse-chorus songs. Its drumming is famous for treating every limb almost independently — a constant hi-hat pulse, a loosely syncopated kick, and off-kilter rimshot accents that never quite land where a straight backbeat would, a style Allen once described as playing several rhythms at once rather than keeping simple time.
Slot A is the core groove; switch to B, C, and D above for variations on it — a genuine stylistic twist, a busier or sparser take, and a fill or break, the same way a real performance of this rhythm would vary it. Press play to hear it, slow the tempo down to study it, or drag the beat blocks apart to see exactly how it's built.
It is free and needs no login. Nothing you change here is saved, so use it as a reference or as the starting point for a beat of your own — then open the RockBlocks drum machine to build from scratch.