ART BLAKEY & THE JAZZ MESSENGERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Moanin'

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-24, 41-45 and 51-60, and 10 more places -- 32.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
133 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
299
LENGTH
9:00
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 133 BPM
MOANIN' · BAR 21

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 61 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 100 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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 100, 116 and 133 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 Moanin' use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 133 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-24, 41-45, 51-60 and 76-80, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 27 times over the song.

Is the beat in Moanin' hard?

44 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 299 BARS ANALYSED