TITLE FIGHT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Be A Toy

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 19-23, 27-31 and 43-47, and 3 more places -- 33% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
92
LENGTH
2:50
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
BE A TOY · BARS 19-20

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 54 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 59 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 85 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, ride 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 85, 100, 115 and 130 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 Be A Toy use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 19-23, 27-31, 43-47 and 51-55, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Be A Toy hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 59 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 92 BARS ANALYSED