SURF CURSE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Disco

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-7, 9-17 and 19, and 8 more places -- 41.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
173 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
105
LENGTH
2:26
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 173 BPM
DISCO · BAR 4

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 25 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 51 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 130 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 130, 151 and 173 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 Disco use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 173 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-7, 9-17, 19 and 21-23, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 21 times over the song.

Is the beat in Disco hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 105 BARS ANALYSED