ALO-A · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Pourquoi Pas...

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 16-23, 25-31 and 33-39, and 2 more places -- 37.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
4:10
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
POURQUOI PAS... · BAR 17

It is played on crash, ride, snare, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 70 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 71 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

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 65 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, ride 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 65, 77, 88 and 100 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 Pourquoi Pas... use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 16-23, 25-31, 33-39 and 68-74, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Pourquoi Pas... hard?

70 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 104 BARS ANALYSED