JAMIE CULLUM · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in All At Sea

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-15, 17-19 and 21, and 32 more places -- 35.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
174 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
166
LENGTH
3:49
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
ALL AT SEA · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, 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 42 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 131 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 131, 152 and 174 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 All At Sea use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-15, 17-19, 21 and 23, and 31 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in All At Sea hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 166 BARS ANALYSED