GORILLAZ · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Doncamatic

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-61 and 72-103 -- 91.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
124 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
103
LENGTH
3:18
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 124 BPM
DONCAMATIC · BAR 19

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 32 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 41 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 93 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, 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 93, 109 and 124 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 Doncamatic use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 124 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 91.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-61 and 72-103. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Doncamatic hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 41 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 · 103 BARS ANALYSED