PAUL MCCARTNEY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dance Tonight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-41 -- 70.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
85 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
61
LENGTH
2:52
DIFFICULTY
27/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 85 BPM
DANCE TONIGHT · BAR 1

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 27 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 64 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.

Tempo goes 64, 74 and 85 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 Dance Tonight use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 85 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 70.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-41. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dance Tonight hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 27 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 · 61 BARS ANALYSED