SKUNK ANANSIE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Secretly

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 63, 71-77 and 85-91, and 6 more places -- 20.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
180 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
243
LENGTH
5:24
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 180 BPM
SECRETLY · BARS 71-72

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 42 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 135 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 135, 158 and 180 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 Secretly use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 180 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 63, 71-77, 85-91 and 113, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Secretly hard?

27 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 243 BARS ANALYSED