GEESE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Au Pays du Cocaine

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 19-30, 32-33 and 44-55, and 1 more place -- 35.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
79 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
76
LENGTH
3:24
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 79 BPM
AU PAYS DU COCAINE · BAR 19

It is played on ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- 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 59 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 59, 69 and 79 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 Au Pays du Cocaine use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 79 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 19-30, 32-33, 44-55 and 57. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Au Pays du Cocaine hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. 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 · 76 BARS ANALYSED