JOHN LENNON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-9, 11-17 and 19-25, and 12 more places -- 79.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
119 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
3:18
DIFFICULTY
31/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 119 BPM
INSTANT KARMA! (WE ALL SHINE ON) · BAR 3

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second 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 89 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 89, 104 and 119 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 Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 119 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 79.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-9, 11-17, 19-25 and 27, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) 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 · 98 BARS ANALYSED