PETER GABRIEL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Come Talk To Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-16, 109-112 and 125-128, and 3 more places -- 20.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
180
LENGTH
7:12
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
COME TALK TO ME · BAR 13

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 37 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 75 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 75, 88 and 100 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 Come Talk To Me use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-16, 109-112, 125-128 and 137-140, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in Come Talk To Me hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 180 BARS ANALYSED