MARCO SFOGLI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dawn

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 43-49, 51-52 and 64-65, and 24 more places -- 26.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
177
LENGTH
4:05
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
DAWN · BAR 43

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 13 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 37 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 98 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, ride 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 98, 114 and 130 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 Dawn use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 3/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 43-49, 51-52, 64-65 and 67-69, and 23 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dawn hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 177 BARS ANALYSED