ATLANTA RHYTHM SECTION · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Spooky Drum Cover

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17, 22 and 26-29, and 18 more places -- 25.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
4:48
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
SPOOKY DRUM COVER · BAR 31

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 37 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 45 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 83 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, ride 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 83, 96 and 110 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 Spooky Drum Cover use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17, 22, 26-29 and 31, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Spooky Drum Cover hard?

37 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 132 BARS ANALYSED