GRUPO FRONTERA, FUERZA REGIDA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in COQUETA

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 44, 50 and 58-60, and 13 more places -- 27.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
153
LENGTH
3:50
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
COQUETA · BAR 59

It is played on ride, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 47 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 120 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. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 120, 140 and 160 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 COQUETA use?

A one-bar groove on ride, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 44, 50, 58-60 and 62, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 21 times over the song.

Is the beat in COQUETA hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 47 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 · 153 BARS ANALYSED