BEE GEES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Spicks And Specks

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-50 and 62-77 -- 80% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
123 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
87
LENGTH
2:50
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 123 BPM
SPICKS AND SPECKS · BAR 11

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 39 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 92 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 92, 108 and 123 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 Spicks And Specks use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 123 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 80% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-50 and 62-77. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Spicks And Specks hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 87 BARS ANALYSED