YOKO KANNO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Call Me Call Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4, 6 and 8, and 22 more places -- 16.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
158 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
179
LENGTH
4:32
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 158 BPM
CALL ME CALL ME · BAR 4

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 32 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 119 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 119, 138 and 158 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 Call Me Call Me use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 158 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 4, 6, 8 and 12, and 21 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Call Me Call Me hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 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 · 179 BARS ANALYSED