ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Mr. Blue Sky

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-11, 13-36 and 53, and 3 more places -- 47% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
178 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
180
LENGTH
4:02
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 178 BPM
MR. BLUE SKY · BAR 10

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 49 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 63 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 134 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, hi-hat 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 134, 156 and 178 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 Mr. Blue Sky use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 178 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 47% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-11, 13-36, 53 and 55-78, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Mr. Blue Sky hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 63 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 · 180 BARS ANALYSED