GLORIA GAYNOR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Will Survive

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-27, 29-43 and 45-67, and 7 more places -- 93.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
5:01
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
I WILL SURVIVE · BAR 13

It is played on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 50 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 86 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 86, 101 and 115 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 Will Survive use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 93.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-27, 29-43, 45-67 and 69-75, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Will Survive hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED