KNOCKED LOOSE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Deep In The Willow + Everything Is Quiet Now

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 31, 35 and 39, and 20 more places -- 18.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
211
LENGTH
6:09
DIFFICULTY
77/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
DEEP IN THE WILLOW + EVERYTHING IS QUIET NOW · BAR 188

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 26 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 77 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 104 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 104, 121 and 138 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 Deep In The Willow + Everything Is Quiet Now use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 31, 35, 39 and 43, and 19 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 32 times over the song.

Is the beat in Deep In The Willow + Everything Is Quiet Now hard?

26 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 77 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 211 BARS ANALYSED