JEFF BECK · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Beck's Bolero

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-22, 34 and 36, and 8 more places -- 30.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
133 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
2:57
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 133 BPM
BECK'S BOLERO · BAR 3

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 43 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 66 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 100 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 100, 116 and 133 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 Beck's Bolero use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 133 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-22, 34, 36 and 38, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Beck's Bolero hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 98 BARS ANALYSED