NICAEA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Kissed a Girl (Katy Perry Cover)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-33, 63-69 and 83-89, and 1 more place -- 27.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
99
LENGTH
3:10
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
I KISSED A GIRL (KATY PERRY COVER) · BAR 27

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 52 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 94 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 94, 109 and 125 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 I Kissed a Girl (Katy Perry Cover) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 27-33, 63-69, 83-89 and 91-96. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Kissed a Girl (Katy Perry Cover) hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 52 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 · 99 BARS ANALYSED