LIPPS INC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Funky Town

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2, 53-76 and 85-100, and 2 more places -- 51.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
122 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
236
LENGTH
7:44
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 122 BPM
FUNKY TOWN · BAR 53

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 45 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 71 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 92 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, hi-hat 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 92, 107 and 122 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 Funky Town use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 122 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 51.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2, 53-76, 85-100 and 149-164, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Funky Town hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 236 BARS ANALYSED