STEELY DAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Doctor Wu

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-31, 33-44 and 82-86, and 3 more places -- 27.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
119
LENGTH
3:58
DIFFICULTY
58/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
DOCTOR WU · BAR 26

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 58 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Doctor Wu use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-31, 33-44, 82-86 and 90-95, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Doctor Wu hard?

36 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 58 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 119 BARS ANALYSED