BILLY JOEL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Vienna

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-24, 32-40 and 42-44, and 9 more places -- 67.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
99
LENGTH
3:10
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
VIENNA · BAR 38

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 47 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 94 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.

Tempo goes 94, 109 and 125 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 Vienna use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 67.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-24, 32-40, 42-44 and 46-48, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Vienna hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 47 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 · 99 BARS ANALYSED