LAINEY WILSON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Somewhere Over Laredo

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-19, 21-23 and 26-32, and 8 more places -- 51.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
117 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
84
LENGTH
2:52
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 117 BPM
SOMEWHERE OVER LAREDO · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 40 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 88 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 88, 102 and 117 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 Somewhere Over Laredo use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 117 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 51.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-19, 21-23, 26-32 and 34-35, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Somewhere Over Laredo hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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 · 84 BARS ANALYSED