LOS PRISIONEROS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in No Necesitamos Banderas

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-31, 33-63 and 67, and 17 more places -- 59.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
179
LENGTH
5:18
DIFFICULTY
87/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
NO NECESITAMOS BANDERAS · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 63 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 87 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 88 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 88, 104, 119 and 135 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 No Necesitamos Banderas use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-31, 33-63, 67 and 71, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in No Necesitamos Banderas hard?

63 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 87 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 179 BARS ANALYSED