DAVID BOWIE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Man Who Sold The World

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-6, 9-19 and 21-31, and 19 more places -- 70.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
118 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
122
LENGTH
4:04
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 118 BPM
THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD · BAR 10

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 13 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 39 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 89 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 89, 103 and 118 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 Man Who Sold The World use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 118 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 70.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-6, 9-19, 21-31 and 36-37, and 18 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Man Who Sold The World hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 39 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 · 122 BARS ANALYSED