NDKH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in EL DJ0NTOS

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 21-27, 29 and 31, and 6 more places -- 15.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
145 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
171
LENGTH
4:43
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 145 BPM
EL DJ0NTOS · BARS 21-22

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 52 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 62 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 94 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, and nothing else. 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 94, 111, 128 and 145 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 DJ0NTOS use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 145 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-27, 29, 31 and 33-34, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in EL DJ0NTOS hard?

52 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 171 BARS ANALYSED