1782 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in She Was A Witch

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 25-41, 43-45 and 47-49, and 14 more places -- 61.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
138
LENGTH
5:30
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
SHE WAS A WITCH · BARS 43-44

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 25 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 37 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 75 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, and nothing else. 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 75, 88 and 100 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 Was A Witch use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 61.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-41, 43-45, 47-49 and 51-53, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in She Was A Witch hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 138 BARS ANALYSED