MAROON 5 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Moves Like Jagger

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-24, 42-48 and 74-80 -- 32.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
107
LENGTH
3:18
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
MOVES LIKE JAGGER · BAR 6

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 42 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 98 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.

Tempo goes 98, 114 and 130 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 Moves Like Jagger use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-24, 42-48 and 74-80. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Moves Like Jagger hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 107 BARS ANALYSED