BODYJAR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in One In A Million

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-13, 26-33 and 53-56, and 2 more places -- 34.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
67
LENGTH
2:53
DIFFICULTY
86/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
ONE IN A MILLION · BAR 8

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 86 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 68 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 68, 79 and 90 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 One In A Million use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-13, 26-33, 53-56 and 64, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in One In A Million hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 86 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 67 BARS ANALYSED