BRITNEY SPEARS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Toxic

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-8, 10-16 and 23-32, and 3 more places -- 59.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
143 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
117
LENGTH
3:16
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 143 BPM
TOXIC · BAR 43

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 14 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 32 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 107 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 107, 125 and 143 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 Toxic use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 143 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-8, 10-16, 23-32 and 43-57, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Toxic hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 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 · 117 BARS ANALYSED