ANCO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in El Cielo No Esta Tan Lejos

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-35, 57-70 and 73-86, and 1 more place -- 41.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
2:34
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
EL CIELO NO ESTA TAN LEJOS · BAR 27

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 13 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 46 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 131 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 131, 153 and 175 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 Cielo No Esta Tan Lejos use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 27-35, 57-70, 73-86 and 101-109. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in El Cielo No Esta Tan Lejos hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 46 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED