GUSTAVO CERATI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Deja Vu

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23, 25-28 and 31-36, and 13 more places -- 50.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
139 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
113
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
84/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 139 BPM
DEJA VU · BAR 17

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 71 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 84 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 76 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 76, 92, 108, 123 and 139 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 Deja Vu use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 139 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 25-28, 31-36 and 39-41, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Deja Vu hard?

71 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 84 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the speed of the hand keeping time.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 113 BARS ANALYSED