RAY PARKER JR. · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ghostbusters

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 7-13, 15-23 and 25, and 17 more places -- 75.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
114 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
122
LENGTH
4:17
DIFFICULTY
58/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 114 BPM
GHOSTBUSTERS · BARS 7-8

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 46 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 58 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 86 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. 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 86, 100 and 114 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 Ghostbusters use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 114 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 75.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7-13, 15-23, 25 and 27, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Ghostbusters hard?

46 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 58 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 · 122 BARS ANALYSED