CHILDISH GAMBINO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Heartbeat

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-41, 49-56 and 73-81, and 7 more places -- 56.5% 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
133
LENGTH
4:26
DIFFICULTY
27/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
HEARTBEAT · BAR 25

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 27 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 90 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.

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 Heartbeat use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 56.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-41, 49-56, 73-81 and 84, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Heartbeat hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 133 BARS ANALYSED