BIG BOTTOM BOY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in 003 Happy

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 2, 4 and 6, and 5 more places -- 57.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
260 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
193
LENGTH
2:58
DIFFICULTY
34/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 260 BPM
003 HAPPY · BARS 10-11

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 34 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 195 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 195, 228 and 260 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does 003 Happy use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 260 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 57.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2, 4, 6 and 8, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in 003 Happy hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 34 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 193 BARS ANALYSED