LOS LOBOS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in La Bamba

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 91-128 -- 32.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
152 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
129
LENGTH
2:51
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 152 BPM
LA BAMBA · BAR 91

It is played on the crash, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 45 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 114 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.

Tempo goes 114, 133 and 152 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 La Bamba use?

A one-bar groove on crash, in 4/4 at 152 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 91-128. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in La Bamba hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 129 BARS ANALYSED