MASAYOSHI TAKANAKA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blue Lagoon

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-14, 16 and 18, and 6 more places -- 30% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
80
LENGTH
2:39
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
BLUE LAGOON · BAR 13

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 33 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 44 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 90 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Blue Lagoon use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-14, 16, 18 and 20-26, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Blue Lagoon hard?

33 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 80 BARS ANALYSED