PINK FLOYD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Comfortably Numb

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15, 19 and 21, and 18 more places -- 35.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
64 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
101
LENGTH
6:19
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 64 BPM
COMFORTABLY NUMB · BAR 15

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 48 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. 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 48, 56 and 64 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 Comfortably Numb use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 64 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15, 19, 21 and 23, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Comfortably Numb hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 101 BARS ANALYSED