Here’s a transcription I’ve been wanting to share for weeks: “Get It Like That” by the Aristocrats (off the first record) with Marco Minnemann on drums. I’m vaguely familiar with Marco’s drumming as he’s part of several projects, but I didn’t know much about this band until I stumbled into the song about a month ago.

I’ve been enjoying many moments from this album, and I have a good chunk of Marco’s playing to share from the tune “Get It Like That”. The song was actually written by Marco himself, and it’s a long fusion jam.

The song has a clear head section, more or less in the form of this riff:

The first ~3 ½ minutes of the track has the band jamming on variations on this riff — it gets a little repetitive, but afterward, the song really gets cooking with a big solo section, starting with guitar and then drums. There are a lot of fun moves during the guitar solo, so I transcribed the drums starting there.

While it doesn’t look like much on paper, one of my favorite moments is this little ensemble thing at the 3:42 mark where Marco plays off of a guitar lick on the ride bell:

Starting at 4:03 there’s some pretty savage 16th note triplet action on the hats and snare:

Aside from the head, the tresillo rhythm shows up as another motif. In addition, you’ll often hear Marco playing triple beat and gallop patterns on the cymbals. 

The band goes through the head just before the drum solo and at 4:47 Marco whips out the double kick for the first time in the score:

It’s an ugly–looking rhythm, but it’s not as complicated as it seems — it’s basically a 32nd note double beat pattern added on top of the dotted eight rhythm from the melody:

Moments later the drum solo starts. There is a vamp from the rest of the band (that eventually looks something like this) but it doesn’t factor into the solo much. Marco begins with a little bit of comping before blasting off with a flurry of 16th note triplets:

Marco is known for using a big drum set, and I think he used most of it for this session — three rack toms, two floor toms. Sometimes Marco puts his smallest rack tom on the right side of his toms, but I don’t think he was doing it for this LP.

I’m not exactly sure that the toms are 100% correct here, but I started to loose my patience and eventually said to myself “the hell with it, close enough”.

Soon after is a little blast beat moment, which starts on a barrage of cymbal hits:

Again, maybe not 100% correct — I tried my best to get all of those cymbals down, but it was tough to make out the exact rhythm he was playing, let alone the exact cymbals. 

Things continue to build with singles between the ride and snare before a big 32nd double kick fill:

The final measure has another scary–looking rhythm:

Again, it’s just a double beat pattern lining up with a dotted 8th note pulse.

The last thing that’ll get your attention is a syncopated ensemble thing that happens right after the solo:

The song goes through the head one more time before an abrupt change into a heavy half–time feel with lots of blast beats.

Whew… this is some of the most intense transcribing I’ve done in a while, and I gotta say, I don’t know if I have the energy to keep doing big stretches of music like this! I think I much prefer doing stuff like that Dave Brubeck track I shared the other week. 

I have close to three minutes of “Get It Like That” transcribed, but I was tempted to do the whole track! My original plan was just to do the drum solo, but I couldn’t help myself and I had to include some more of Marco’s playing.

Every time I share a transcription, I think I might have to include a bonus section at the end of my article called “MuseScore 4 Bug of the Week” since I find new glitches every time I use the program. 

This time around I’ve learned that there’s no way to delete a measure from your score. You can still use “Remove empty trailing measures” from the tools menu to get rid of extra bars from the end of the project, but there’s no way to select an individual measure and remove it. Command + Delete (⌘⌫) doesn’t work. Right–clicking “delete measures” doesn’t work. That bar isn’t going anywhere. Better rewrite your composition accordingly!

Edit: I think I’ve concluded that this glitch is not baked into MuseScore, but something triggers it as I’m using the software. I can't even begin to imagine what causes this one.

Download PDF.

“Get It Like That” on Songwhip.