APHEX TWIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Alberto Balsalm

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4-7, 10-13 and 16-19, and 5 more places -- 30.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
94 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
110
LENGTH
4:40
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 94 BPM
ALBERTO BALSALM · BAR 4

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 48 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 71 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 71, 82 and 94 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 Alberto Balsalm use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 94 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 4-7, 10-13, 16-19 and 22-25, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in Alberto Balsalm hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 48 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 110 BARS ANALYSED