MAC MILLER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Surf

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 7, 9-12 and 30-32, and 12 more places -- 30.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
72 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
76
LENGTH
4:12
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 72 BPM
SURF · BAR 30

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 54 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 54, 63 and 72 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 Surf use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 72 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7, 9-12, 30-32 and 34, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Surf hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 76 BARS ANALYSED