MICHAEL JACKSON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Burn This Disco Out

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 82, 91-92 and 94-96, and 5 more places -- 15.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
115
LENGTH
3:47
DIFFICULTY
84/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
BURN THIS DISCO OUT · BAR 91

It is played on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 67 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 84 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 75 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 75, 88, 102 and 115 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 Burn This Disco Out use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 82, 91-92, 94-96 and 98-100, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Burn This Disco Out hard?

67 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 84 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 115 BARS ANALYSED