CHARLIE BROWN JR. · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ela Vai Voltar

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-19, 21-65 and 72-79 -- 85.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
105 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
80
LENGTH
3:03
DIFFICULTY
29/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 105 BPM
ELA VAI VOLTAR · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 29 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 79 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 79, 92 and 105 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 Ela Vai Voltar use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 105 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 85.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-19, 21-65 and 72-79. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ela Vai Voltar hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 29 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 80 BARS ANALYSED