LADY GAGA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Abracadabra

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-40, 46-50 and 56-60, and 4 more places -- 46.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
135
LENGTH
4:30
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
ABRACADABRA · BAR 26

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 14 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 32 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 90 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 and 120 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 Abracadabra use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 46.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-40, 46-50, 56-60 and 66-80, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Abracadabra hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 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 · 135 BARS ANALYSED