MAC MILLER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Cinderella

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5, 7 and 9, and 14 more places -- 16.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
3:46
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
CINDERELLA · BAR 21

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 35 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 105 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, hi-hat 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 105, 123 and 140 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 Cinderella use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5, 7, 9 and 11, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Cinderella hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 35 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 · 132 BARS ANALYSED