EDSON TRAORE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in She's Got Me Dancing

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-29, 31-33 and 51-53, and 3 more places -- 19.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
112 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
3:30
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
SHE'S GOT ME DANCING · BAR 28

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 53 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 66 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

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 73 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 73, 86, 99 and 112 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 She's Got Me Dancing use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 27-29, 31-33, 51-53 and 55-57, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in She's Got Me Dancing hard?

53 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the speed of the hand keeping time.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 98 BARS ANALYSED