MAKE A CHANGE KILL YOURSELF · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Chapter Iv

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 65, 67 and 69, and 112 more places -- 38.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
800
LENGTH
20:00
DIFFICULTY
69/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
CHAPTER IV · BAR 370

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 70 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 69 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 78 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 78, 92, 106 and 120 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 Chapter Iv use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 3/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 65, 67, 69 and 71, and 111 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 36 times over the song.

Is the beat in Chapter Iv hard?

70 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 800 BARS ANALYSED