MOMMY LONG LEGS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sorority Girls

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5-11, and 3 more places -- 32% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
133 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
75
LENGTH
2:15
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 133 BPM
SORORITY GIRLS · BAR 1

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 51 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 100 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. 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 100, 116 and 133 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 Sorority Girls use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 133 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 5-11 and 13-15, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sorority Girls hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 75 BARS ANALYSED