SIMON & GARFUNKEL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Boxer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 56-80, 83-100 and 109-153, and 1 more place -- 50.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
185 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
237
LENGTH
5:07
DIFFICULTY
34/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 185 BPM
THE BOXER · BAR 56

It is played on snare, mid tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 34 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 139 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 139, 162 and 185 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 Boxer use?

A one-bar groove on snare, mid tom and kick, in 4/4 at 185 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 56-80, 83-100, 109-153 and 219-237. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Boxer hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 34 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 · 237 BARS ANALYSED