JOHN LEE HOOKER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Boom Boom Boom

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 36-42, 44-50 and 52-58, and 10 more places -- 59.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
168 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
177
LENGTH
4:13
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 168 BPM
BOOM BOOM BOOM · BAR 37

It is played on ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 50 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 62 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 126 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. 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 126, 147 and 168 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 Boom Boom Boom use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 168 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 36-42, 44-50, 52-58 and 60-66, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Boom Boom Boom hard?

50 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 177 BARS ANALYSED