NEIL DIAMOND · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sweet Caroline

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-5, 8-21 and 46-59, and 1 more place -- 35.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
127 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
108
LENGTH
3:24
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 127 BPM
SWEET CAROLINE · BAR 3

It is played on kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 61 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 95 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, and nothing else. 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 95, 111 and 127 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 Sweet Caroline use?

A one-bar groove on kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 127 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-5, 8-21, 46-59 and 84-88. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sweet Caroline hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 108 BARS ANALYSED