TURNSTILE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in HOLIDAY

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-15 and 67-82 -- 28.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
155 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
110
LENGTH
2:50
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 155 BPM
HOLIDAY · BAR 1

It is played on the hi-hat, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 6 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 38 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 116 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. 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 116, 136 and 155 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 HOLIDAY use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, in 4/4 at 155 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-15 and 67-82. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in HOLIDAY hard?

6 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 38 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 · 110 BARS ANALYSED