BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in No Woman No Cry

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-28 and 37-52 -- 27.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
99 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
91
LENGTH
3:39
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 99 BPM
NO WOMAN NO CRY · BAR 21

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 50 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 53 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 74 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. 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 74, 87 and 99 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 Woman No Cry use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 99 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-28 and 37-52. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in No Woman No Cry hard?

50 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 91 BARS ANALYSED