BROADWAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hamilton - Satisfied

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 16, 18 and 20, and 27 more places -- 37.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
124 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
131
LENGTH
4:14
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 124 BPM
HAMILTON - SATISFIED · BAR 16

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 34 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 54 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 93 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, 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 93, 109 and 124 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 Hamilton - Satisfied use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 124 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 16, 18, 20 and 22, and 26 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hamilton - Satisfied hard?

34 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 54 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 131 BARS ANALYSED