WILLIE COLÓN, HÉCTOR LAVOE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in EL DIA DE MI SUERTE

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-13, 34-37 and 46-49, and 4 more places -- 30.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
88 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
131
LENGTH
5:57
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 88 BPM
EL DIA DE MI SUERTE · BAR 10

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 51 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 66 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 66, 77 and 88 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 DIA DE MI SUERTE use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 88 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-13, 34-37, 46-49 and 58-65, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in EL DIA DE MI SUERTE hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 131 BARS ANALYSED