YELLOWED WALLPAPER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Maria

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 141-152, 154-156 and 158, and 9 more places -- 19.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
70 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
194
LENGTH
11:21
DIFFICULTY
80/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 70 BPM
MARIA · BAR 141

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

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 53 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 53, 61 and 70 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 Maria use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 70 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 141-152, 154-156, 158 and 160-162, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Maria hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. 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 · 198 BARS ANALYSED