MARIA MENA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Just Hold Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21, 25-26 and 41, and 10 more places -- 23.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
91 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 91 BPM
JUST HOLD ME · BAR 21

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 26 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 41 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. 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 68, 80 and 91 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 Just Hold Me use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 91 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21, 25-26, 41 and 44, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Just Hold Me hard?

26 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 41 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