THE ANGELS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 44-59, 82-97 and 110-141 -- 45.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
166 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
3:23
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 166 BPM
AM I EVER GONNA SEE YOUR FACE AGAIN · BAR 45

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 54 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 68 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 108 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 108, 127, 147 and 166 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 Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 166 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 45.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 44-59, 82-97 and 110-141. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 141 BARS ANALYSED