← SONGS

Shake It Off · Taylor Swift

EXERCISE 5 OF 9
Join Chorus to Break (bars 43-45)
130 / 136 BARS COVERED
0 / 9 PASSED · 3 BARS LIT · IN THE CHORUS, BREAK
CHORUS
BREAK
CHORUS 2
OUTRO
4 groovesBAS2S4Fill into the next barFill that ends a sectionInto the next partStop / hitRest
GROOVE · 2
RUN · 2
JOIN · 2
SECTION · 2
WHOLE SONG · 1
ABOUT THIS DRUM PART

How to play Shake It Off on drums

136 bars at 160 BPM -- fast, and 3:24 of it without a break -- on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot.

32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
136
LENGTH
3:24
DIFFICULTY
32/100

hi-hat through bars 1-44, silence through bars 45-99 and snare through bars 100-136.

The beat

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2, 4 and 6, and 62 more places -- 50.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

    4
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
SD |----r---r---r---|
BD |x---------x---x-|
Shake It Off -- the groove · x hit · o open hi-hat · g ghost note · r cross-stick · X accent

The fills

There are no fills to speak of: the part holds one beat the whole way through.

What the course does

It cuts the song into 8 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. The grooves the song is built on -- B, A -- 4 exercises, about 29 minutes.
  2. The whole song -- 5 exercises, about 28 minutes. Open above.
START THE COURSE ↑

Questions

What BPM is Shake It Off?

160 BPM, in 4/4, with the time kept in sixteenth notes. At that speed the sixteenth notes are the whole difficulty, so the room will take it down to a quarter of it and climb back.

Is Shake It Off hard to play on drums?

32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it. The beat itself is 15 out of 100; the rest of the number is everything around it.

How long is the drum part?

136 bars, about 3:24 at the written tempo. The course breaks it into 8 exercises over 2 sittings, about 29 minutes each.

What do I need on the kit?

hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot. Nothing in the part asks for anything else.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 136 BARS ANALYSED