INK - AMYLEE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in A Work Of Art

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 35-37, 39 and 41, and 18 more places -- 20% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
202 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
198
LENGTH
3:55
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 202 BPM
A WORK OF ART · BAR 35

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 53 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 152 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 152, 177 and 202 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 A Work Of Art use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 202 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 35-37, 39, 41 and 43-45, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in A Work Of Art hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 198 BARS ANALYSED