TINA TURNER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Best

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 34-36, 42-44 and 47-53, and 3 more places -- 19% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
108 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
3:56
DIFFICULTY
84/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 108 BPM
THE BEST · BAR 48

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 84 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 70 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 70, 83, 95 and 108 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 The Best use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 108 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 34-36, 42-44, 47-53 and 55-57, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in The Best hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 84 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 106 BARS ANALYSED