TRAIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in 50 Ways To Say Goodbye

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-24, 43-48 and 50-57, and 1 more place -- 28.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
139
LENGTH
3:58
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
50 WAYS TO SAY GOODBYE · BAR 9

It is played on kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 41 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 105 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 105, 123 and 140 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 50 Ways To Say Goodbye use?

A one-bar groove on kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-24, 43-48, 50-57 and 59-66. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in 50 Ways To Say Goodbye hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 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 · 139 BARS ANALYSED