BOW WOW WOW · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Want Candy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-21, 23-37 and 39-42, and 3 more places -- 68.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
73
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
I WANT CANDY · BAR 12

It is played on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 57 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 68 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. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 68, 79 and 90 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 Want Candy use?

A one-bar groove on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 68.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-21, 23-37, 39-42 and 51-59, and 2 more places.

Is the beat in I Want Candy hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 73 BARS ANALYSED