MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Shake Your Tail

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18-25, 44-47 and 52-66 -- 40.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
142 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
67
LENGTH
1:52
DIFFICULTY
58/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 142 BPM
SHAKE YOUR TAIL · BAR 19

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 65 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 58 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 92 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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. 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.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 92, 109, 125 and 142 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 Shake Your Tail use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 142 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 40.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18-25, 44-47 and 52-66. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Shake Your Tail hard?

65 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 58 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 · 67 BARS ANALYSED