SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Spellbound

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-24, 35-50 and 79-94, and 1 more place -- 44.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
149 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 149 BPM
SPELLBOUND · BAR 18

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

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 112 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 112, 130 and 149 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 Spellbound use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 149 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 44.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-24, 35-50, 79-94 and 111-117. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Spellbound hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 121 BARS ANALYSED