EYEHATEGOD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Depress

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 89-102, 105-119 and 121-123, and 1 more place -- 27.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
64 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
127
LENGTH
7:43
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 64 BPM
DEPRESS · BAR 90

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 64 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, 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 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 Depress use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 64 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 89-102, 105-119, 121-123 and 125. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Depress hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 64 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 · 127 BARS ANALYSED