AMY MCDONALD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in lets start a band

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 56-63 and 68-79 -- 34.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
94 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
90
LENGTH
3:50
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 94 BPM
LETS START A BAND · BAR 56

It is played on kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 5 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

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 71 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 71, 82 and 94 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 lets start a band use?

A one-bar groove on kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 94 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 56-63 and 68-79. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in lets start a band hard?

5 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 · 90 BARS ANALYSED