STING · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Shape Of My Heart

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-30, 33-46 and 49-62, and 5 more places -- 92.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
164 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
187
LENGTH
4:34
DIFFICULTY
34/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 164 BPM
SHAPE OF MY HEART · BAR 17

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 34 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 123 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 123, 144 and 164 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 Shape Of My Heart use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 164 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 92.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-30, 33-46, 49-62 and 65-78, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Shape Of My Heart hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 34 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the speed of the hand keeping time the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 187 BARS ANALYSED