CHUCK MANGIONE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Feels So Good

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3, 5 and 9-13, and 17 more places -- 38.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
119 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
120
LENGTH
4:02
DIFFICULTY
69/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 119 BPM
FEELS SO GOOD · BAR 1

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 69 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 89 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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, ride 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 89, 104 and 119 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 Feels So Good use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 119 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3, 5, 9-13 and 15, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Feels So Good hard?

37 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 120 BARS ANALYSED