ROBBIE WILLIAMS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Let Me Entertain You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 51-57, 71-77 and 103-109, and 2 more places -- 35.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
128
LENGTH
4:06
DIFFICULTY
80/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU · BAR 51

It is played on snare, high tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 71 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 80 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 69 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, and nothing else. 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 69, 83, 97, 111 and 125 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 Me Entertain You use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 51-57, 71-77, 103-109 and 111-125, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Let Me Entertain You hard?

71 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 80 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 128 BARS ANALYSED