A PERFECT CIRCLE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Crimes

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 29-60 -- 53.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
60
LENGTH
2:00
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
CRIMES · BARS 29-30

It is played on crash, snare, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 34 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 39 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 90 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 90, 105 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 Crimes use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 53.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 29-60.

Is the beat in Crimes hard?

34 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 39 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 · 60 BARS ANALYSED