THE TURTLES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Happy Together

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4-12, 14-20 and 31-32, and 3 more places -- 39.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
86
LENGTH
2:52
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
HAPPY TOGETHER · BAR 4

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 70 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Happy Together use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 4-12, 14-20, 31-32 and 34-36, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Happy Together hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 86 BARS ANALYSED