BEE GEES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Started A Joke

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18-37, 55-65 and 84, and 1 more place -- 40.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
67 BPM
TIME
2/4
BARS
110
LENGTH
3:17
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 67 BPM
I STARTED A JOKE · BAR 18

It is played on ride, hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 15 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 35 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 50 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, ride 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 50, 59 and 67 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 Started A Joke use?

A one-bar groove on ride, hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 2/4 at 67 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 40.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18-37, 55-65, 84 and 86-95. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Started A Joke hard?

15 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 110 BARS ANALYSED