MARTY STUART · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hey Baby

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-10, 16-20 and 26-30, and 4 more places -- 61.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
89
LENGTH
2:58
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
HEY BABY · BAR 16

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 67 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 67 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

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 78 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 78, 92, 106 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 Hey Baby use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 61.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-10, 16-20, 26-30 and 36-40, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hey Baby hard?

67 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 89 BARS ANALYSED