STEVIE WONDER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Wish

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-40 and 45-109 -- 95.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
105 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
109
LENGTH
4:09
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 105 BPM
I WISH · BARS 5-6

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 59 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 79 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 79, 92 and 105 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 Wish use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 105 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 95.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-40 and 45-109. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in I Wish hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 109 BARS ANALYSED