BLONDIE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hanging On The Telephone

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-10, 19-25 and 40-45, and 1 more place -- 30.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
85
LENGTH
2:16
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 56 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 113 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 113, 131 and 150 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 Hanging On The Telephone use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-10, 19-25, 40-45 and 59-64. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hanging On The Telephone hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 56 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 · 85 BARS ANALYSED