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Clear Blue Skies · Alternative Competition 6

EXERCISE 1 OF 26
Groove B -- Chorus (a two-bar phrase)
0 / 144 BARS COVERED
0 / 26 PASSED · 68 BARS LIT
COUNT-IN
CHORUS
PART E
CHORUS 2
PART A
CHORUS 3
OUTRO
OUTRO 2
6 groovesBEIS1A+1Fill into the next barFill that ends a sectionInto the next partStop / hitRest
GROOVE · 8
RUN · 1
JOIN · 7
LINK · 4
SECTION · 5
WHOLE SONG · 1
ABOUT THIS DRUM PART

How to play Clear Blue Skies on drums

144 bars at 164 BPM -- fast, and 3:31 of it without a break -- on crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick.

45 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO
164 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
3:31
DIFFICULTY
45/100

silence through bars 1-16, hi-hat through bars 17-32, ride through bars 33-48, hi-hat through bars 49-64, kick and crashes through bars 65-71 and snare through bars 72-80, and 4 more changes after that.

The beat

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 17-31, 49-63 and 81-95, and 9 more places -- 53.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

    17               18
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a 1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
CC |----------------|--------x---x---|
HH |o-------o-------|x---x-----------|
SD |----x-------x---|----x---xxxxxxxx|
BD |x-------x-------|x---------------|
Clear Blue Skies -- the groove · x hit · o open hi-hat · g ghost note · r cross-stick · X accent

The fills

There are no fills to speak of: the part holds one beat the whole way through.

What the course does

It cuts the song into 25 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. The grooves the song is built on -- B, I -- 3 exercises, about 24 minutes. Open above.
  2. Through the Chorus and Part E -- 2 exercises, about 28 minutes.
  3. Through the Chorus and Part E -- 4 exercises, about 26 minutes.
  4. Bars 45-73 -- 5 exercises, about 29 minutes.
  5. Bars 71-96 -- 5 exercises, about 29 minutes.
  6. Bars 93-116 -- 5 exercises, about 24 minutes.
  7. The whole song -- 2 exercises, about 20 minutes.
START THE COURSE ↑

Questions

What BPM is Clear Blue Skies?

164 BPM, in 4/4, with the time kept in sixteenth notes. At that speed the sixteenth notes are the whole difficulty, so the room will take it down to a quarter of it and climb back.

Is Clear Blue Skies hard to play on drums?

45 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet. The beat itself is 36 out of 100; the rest of the number is everything around it.

How long is the drum part?

144 bars, about 3:31 at the written tempo. The course breaks it into 25 exercises over 7 sittings, about 26 minutes each.

What do I need on the kit?

crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick. That is most of a full kit; the part moves around it rather than sitting in one place.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 144 BARS ANALYSED