ESSENTIALLY ELLINGTON 2021 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Black Butterfly

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 41-48 and 57-60 -- 17.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
96 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
71
LENGTH
2:55
DIFFICULTY
29/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 96 BPM
BLACK BUTTERFLY · BAR 41

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 11 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 29 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 72 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 72, 84 and 96 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 Black Butterfly use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 96 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 41-48 and 57-60. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in Black Butterfly hard?

11 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 29 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 · 71 BARS ANALYSED