EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lucky Man

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13, 29-31 and 33, and 8 more places -- 20.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
50 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
118
LENGTH
7:05
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 50 BPM
LUCKY MAN · BAR 29

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 46 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 60 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 40 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 40, 44 and 50 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 Lucky Man use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 3/4 at 50 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13, 29-31, 33 and 35-42, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lucky Man hard?

46 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 60 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 · 118 BARS ANALYSED