SPËCHT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Beat It (Michael Jackson)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-16, 33-39 and 41-43, and 13 more places -- 54.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
139 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
142
LENGTH
4:05
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 139 BPM
BEAT IT (MICHAEL JACKSON) · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 70 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 104 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 104, 122 and 139 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 Beat It (Michael Jackson) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 139 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 54.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-16, 33-39, 41-43 and 45-59, and 12 more places.

Is the beat in Beat It (Michael Jackson) hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 142 BARS ANALYSED