BAD LIP READING · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in My Stick

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 37-41, 57-58 and 62-71, and 6 more places -- 49.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
138
LENGTH
4:35
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
MY STICK · BAR 37

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 7 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 32 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 90 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 and 120 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 My Stick use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 49.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 37-41, 57-58, 62-71 and 77-86, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in My Stick hard?

7 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 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 · 138 BARS ANALYSED