BEYONCE KNOWLES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in If I Were a Boy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18-24, 26-32 and 50-56, and 3 more places -- 61.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
90
LENGTH
3:59
DIFFICULTY
31/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
IF I WERE A BOY · BAR 19

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 15 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 31 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. 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 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 If I Were a Boy use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 61.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18-24, 26-32, 50-56 and 58-71, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in If I Were a Boy hard?

15 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 31 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 90 BARS ANALYSED