ORLEANS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dance With Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-25, 27 and 29-30, and 4 more places -- 28.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
72
LENGTH
2:53
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
DANCE WITH ME · BAR 22

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 5 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

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 75 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, 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 75, 88 and 100 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 With Me use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-25, 27, 29-30 and 37-39, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dance With Me hard?

5 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 · 72 BARS ANALYSED