DIRE STRAITS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Calling Elvis

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-27, 29-31 and 33-36, and 7 more places -- 51.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
117 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
126
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 117 BPM
CALLING ELVIS · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 65 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 83 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 76 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 76, 90, 103 and 117 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 Calling Elvis use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 117 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 51.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-27, 29-31, 33-36 and 45-51, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Calling Elvis hard?

65 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 126 BARS ANALYSED