AMANDA MARSHALL AI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Let it rain

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-15, 17-18 and 21-27, and 12 more places -- 62.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
74 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
84
LENGTH
4:32
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 74 BPM
LET IT RAIN · BAR 14

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 37 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 56 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 56, 65 and 74 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 Let it rain use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 74 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 62.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-15, 17-18, 21-27 and 29-35, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Let it rain hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 84 BARS ANALYSED