MICHAEL JACKSON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-27, 29-31 and 33-35, and 10 more places -- 91.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
119 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
182
LENGTH
6:07
DIFFICULTY
91/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 119 BPM
DON'T STOP 'TIL YOU GET ENOUGH · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 80 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 91 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 65 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, hi-hat 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 65, 79, 92, 106 and 119 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 Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 119 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 91.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-27, 29-31, 33-35 and 37-39, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough hard?

80 out of 100 on its own -- hard. The song as a whole is 91 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 182 BARS ANALYSED