TAKING BACK SUNDAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Cute Without The 'E' (Cut From the Team)

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 89-125 -- 24% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
195 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
161
LENGTH
3:18
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 195 BPM
CUTE WITHOUT THE 'E' (CUT FROM THE TEAM) · BARS 89-90

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 54 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 146 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 146, 171 and 195 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 Cute Without The 'E' (Cut From the Team) use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 195 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 24% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 89-125. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Cute Without The 'E' (Cut From the Team) hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 54 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 161 BARS ANALYSED