JAMIROQUAI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Deeper Underground

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 34, 36 and 38, and 28 more places -- 26.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
200 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
204
LENGTH
4:05
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 200 BPM
DEEPER UNDERGROUND · BAR 34

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 42 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 150 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 150, 175 and 200 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 Deeper Underground use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 200 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 34, 36, 38 and 40, and 27 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Deeper Underground hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 204 BARS ANALYSED