CAFE TACUBA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in El Baile Y El Salon

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18-26, 29-30 and 33, and 9 more places -- 34.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
3:54
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
EL BAILE Y EL SALON · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 53 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 73 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 75 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 75, 88, 102 and 115 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 El Baile Y El Salon use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18-26, 29-30, 33 and 35-37, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in El Baile Y El Salon hard?

53 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED